


The School for Scandal; or, The Patron

by palalife



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Royalty, Bigotry & Prejudice, Genosha, M/M, Mutant Politics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-12
Updated: 2013-09-12
Packaged: 2017-12-26 08:34:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/963853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/palalife/pseuds/palalife
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Graymalkin Institute, a run-down, forgotten school in a forgotten corner of Genosha, is run by Charles Xavier, the forgotten and dispossessed heir of a disgraced and once-noble House. Years ago, he entered into an agreement with Emma Frost of the Massachusetts Academy to prevent the government from shutting down the Institute, and now she's calling in her debt. The terms of the agreement: find blackmail material on the Duke of Genosha himself, Erik Lehnsherr.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The School for Scandal; or, The Patron

**Author's Note:**

> Here is mine and Pala's entry for the 2013 X-Men Reverse Bang challenge! As always, Pala's art is perfect and lovely, and I trail behind her, trying to write something that does her justice. This ended up being far more political and angsty than I wanted it to be, and I had a hellish time trying to get it to behave, but I hope you enjoy it anyway.
> 
> Many thanks to Pala, as always, for taking my muse and making it run out of control, to **keire_ke** , **stewardish** , and **professor** for talking me through some very difficult plot points, and to everyone on the #xmentales chat who word-warred with me and helped me through the last few thousand words. You are all the most amazing fandom.

**School for Scandal; or, The Patron**

Charles eased himself out from under the arm wrapped around him. Erik stirred and muttered, rising briefly up and out of dreamstate until Charles soothed him back down into it. Unlike before, in Charles's apartments, when the slightest movement jerked Erik back to wakefulness, Erik's mind had the sense of not wanting to be awake; it wanted to stay asleep, wrapped up and warm and quiet, _content_ in a way that the Duke of Genosha was rarely allowed to be.

The desk and its secret drawer sat in the corner of the study attached to Erik's bedroom, looming dark and ornate in the nighttime shadows. The secrets in the secret drawer waited, too. Charles swallowed as he thought about it, sparing a brief thought to pull on his robe. As he looked down at Erik, sprawled out and sated in the wreck of their bed, still naked under the sheets pulled over him – Charles could see every line of his body, every line that had been pressed up against his, shaping their contours to his – he thought, not for the first time, that he should stop right now.

He should wake Erik up and tell him everything, from its beginning years ago to why Charles was awake, wrapped up in his own robe and anxious in the middle of the night. Take Erik's anger, and take whatever penalty Emma wanted to mete out.

Except. He thought about Alex and Anne Marie, the others he still had to help.

 _This is what you have to do_ , he told himself.

 

_**Eleven months ago** _

The Graymalkin Institute occupied one corner of a rambling brick office complex in a downtrodden corner of New Salem District, next to a defunct restaurant and two doors down from an empty attorney's office. A small sign, its letters tattered and faded and reading _Gr ym lkin Insti te_ , indicated its presence. It had no existence in the business directories online, although the dossier held on it by Genosha Intelligence was considerable. The small community that made use of it knew it mostly by word of mouth, and word of mouth was how it spread, a quiet, always-there presence in the background.

_Can't control your abilities? Shamed by parents and peers? I know this place._

Charles had just finished an intake questionnaire for a new student – he preferred "student" rather than "patient" or "client" – when he caught the leading edge of a familiar, and unwelcome, mind sweeping up the street like a cold wind.

He knew, of course, what Emma Frost wanted and why she was here – or, Charles supposed, would be here as soon as her driver pulled up to the door. He hadn't seen her for six years, not since she'd collected his signature on their contract, and while it had been foolish for him to hope that he'd never see her ever again, Charles hadn't been able to keep himself from hoping.

"Are you feeling in control?" he asked the little boy, who was still shuddering and only half-visible.

"I think so," the boy, Nicholas, said into his mother's cardigan. With some telepathic prompting from Charles, he became fully visible again and stayed that way – for three minutes, until his concentration wavered and he slid into transparency. Charles quickly settled a command into Nicholas's subconscious to keep him visible for the next two days. The command would wear off, as it was meant to, given the natural, constant urge in Nicholas's body to return to invisibility, but it would at least give his mother – and Nicholas himself – a respite.

"Is he _always_ going to be like this?" Nicholas's mother asked with a sigh. Her frustration bled into the air, coloring it a vivid orange and red. She stroked Nicholas's dark hair fondly, her fingers tightening on his little shoulder as if to reassure herself he was still there.

"Not always," Charles said, striving for the pleasant confidence he usually adopted when confronted by a frustrated parent or frightened child. _Everyone_ could be helped, he believed, and it wasn't a shame to ask for help, despite the fact that Graymalkin was hidden in a forgotten corner of a mostly-forgotten district, run by an entirely-forgotten doctor, the last scion of an obliterated House.

For now, though, he needed to get them out of here before Emma, her aura rushing before her like a great crystalline wave, came in. He barely managed to hustle them out the students' exit in the back, sending Nick off with a smile and his mother with an appointment to discuss the results of Nick's last tests, before Emma opened the office's front door.

"Charles," Emma said, all ice and pleasantness. She peered around the reception room, studying the Formica counter top as if expecting some contagion to leap up on her and infect her. "I hope we're alone?"

"Darwin's out, if that's what you want to know," Charles told her. Darwin had house calls today, not a small mercy – or, Charles was sure, a small coincidence. Raven had her apprenticeship with the provincial government, difficult for Charles to accept but, he recognized, necessary for her, and one of the few ways back into respectable society. "And I think I can guess why you're here. Would you like a drink?"

"I highly doubt you have halfway decent vodka in this place." _Halfway decent anything_ , Emma thought, with clarity sufficient for Charles to know that she meant him to overhear. She began to move, a dazzling column of white silk and viciously pointed heels, back to Charles's office. "Although maybe you do," she said, frowning at a stack of _Your Powers And You_ brochures. "I certainly would."

"Come on," Charles sighed. "Let's sit down, you tell me how I have to repay you, and we can get this over with." He _did_ have more than halfway decent Scotch in his desk drawer, but he refused to let Emma see even the slightest hint of that.

"Lovely," Emma purred. _As much as I'd love to have this discussion over drinks and dinner on the terrace at Hammer Bay, watching your face is going to be almost as delicious._

Charles let her into his office, clearing off a chair for her and taking her coat, the heavy silver-on-white brocade lush against his skin. He wondered if she'd bought it with his non-refundable _deposit_ , almost the last of the inheritance left to him after years of lawsuits and investigations into the loyalty of Xavier House had drained his father's resources. Emma crossed her legs and produced a thick folder from the white leather purse she'd set down by her stilettoed foot.

"So," Charles said, "what do you want?"

"Under the terms of your _contract_ ," Emma said, "ten years ago, the Massachusetts Academy provided you certain services to ensure that the Parliamentary Committee for Assimilationist Affairs would cease its investigations into you, your family, and your activities. We have upheld our end of the bargain."

"So you did," Charles agreed. The last time anyone from the PCAA had come around had been two weeks before his agreement with Emma. Ten years of peace and helping people, the first-generation mutants or the ones who had developed blocks against their powers – the same ones mainstream Genoshan society shunned for being too human-like, too afraid, in its desperation to escape from what it derisively termed _baseline fears_. Charles, in his dusty office, did not miss the irony in that. "And now it's my turn."

"I don't like the phrase _tit for tat_ , but aside from a deposit to secure our services, we do ask for payment in kind." Emma handed Charles the folder, tapping a manicured finger on it when Charles gingerly set it on the edge of his desk. "You'll find the terms of your payment in the folder, along with all the documentation you need to discharge your debt to the School."

"What if I don't?" Charles asked. The folder was ugly, bulging with secrets he didn't want to know.

"Then you can kiss the Institute goodbye," Emma said with a sabre-like smile. "Along with any chance at regaining your family's stature in Genoshan society."

"You're saying that like I _want_ to regain my family's stature in Genoshan society," Charles said sarcastically. "I'm still here, I'm helping to make life better for _all_ mutants, contrary to what the PCAA wanted to think I was doing."

"Charles of House Xavier, not wanting to return to the glory days of his House?" Emma flicked a glance at the portrait on Charles's desk, a dark-haired man and a blonde woman. "A man born to privilege and power – a House, not a two generations ago, poised to make a bid for a Dukedom – happy to spend his life in a tiny apartment above his practice. Really."

"Really," Charles said. He pulled the folder to him. "I'm doing this because I made a promise, Ms. Frost. And because there's no one to help children who need it, if I don't." _You wouldn't_ , he couldn't help adding.

"I give to charity," Emma said smoothly. She stood just as smoothly, her silk dress and jacket not even rustling. "You have a day to confirm your decision to fulfill the terms of our contract. If I don't hear from you by tomorrow at five, you'll be receiving a visit from the PCAA sooner rather than later, I wager."

 

 ** _One week later_**

Charles finished the last client letter, telling himself he should be glad he had only fifty-three students to deliver into Darwin's capable hands. Of those, only ten were intractably difficult, resentful of their lack of control and more dangerous for that. Darwin could absorb – literally – anything the kids could throw at him, and Raven could cajole the rest into cooperation.

He looked around his office, seeing its clutter and cheery yellow paint as if for the first time. Bright designs covered the walls instead of paintings or photos – Raven's work, to help the younger ones (and they were mostly younger ones) feel secure. A painting by a contemporary human artist had once hung on the wall across from Charles's desk, but the PCAA had confiscated it. After that, putting anything else up there seemed pointless.

 _Ten years of this, and I'm probably saying goodbye to it_ , he thought. Congenital Control Deficiency had defined his life, and now – not another set of priorities, he told himself as he pulled the plain blue dossier to himself. A set of related ones, priorities necessary to see that his work could go forward. That they were priorities also aligned with those of Emma and the Massachusetts School was something Charles preferred not to think about. What those priorities were, Emma hid behind layers and layers of diamond, ice, and steel, the locks frozen over. Charles could have gotten it from her, maybe, but not without nearly killing both of them.

In the folder were documents. The papers with his assignment and the background he needed to know had been destroyed, the information buried under many layers of Charles's own psychic shielding. All that remained, aside from a wardrobe sufficient to his new identity, a car titled to him, and a substantial bank account that had been accruing interest for nearly ten years – a testament to how long Emma had been considering this line of possibility – were the documents in the folder in front of him. When Charles had upended the envelope, a key ring for the car and his apartment, slid heavily into his palm.

 _You'll need to become Francis Pembroke_ , Emma had said. She had given him a psionic packet of information, much of it extra details not included in the dossier. _Being a telepath and all, you'll be able to be a bit more… convincing when it comes to establishing your identity. The palace, and most of the other ducal residences and offices, are covered by telepathic buffers._

She'd made a face, and now, looking back on it, Charles laughed; at least they both appreciated the irony of having a mutation against which even other mutants felt it necessary to take precautions.

Right now, he wore Francis Pembroke like an ill-fitting suit. Charles wondered if he could _become_ Francis, whoever he was beyond the biography sketch Emma had given him, the car, the money and everything else. Graymalkin had sucked so much out of him he had boggled at the size of Francis's bank account, and then at the address Emma had given him, a penthouse in one of the high-rent districts near the capitol buildings.

_You're the quiet sort. Not the kind to flaunt his money; you can get away with not wearing it on your sleeve. You've got an interest in history and politics – nothing radical, naturally, but you're thinking about getting your doctorate. You've traveled a lot, but now you want to settle down. Reconnect with your roots. Remember what it's like to be Genoshan._

Charles had never felt properly Genoshan, not since his father's unorthodox ideas about mutation and control had become common knowledge beyond being the grist that fed the gossip mill. It certainly hadn't been since the anti-assimilationists in the Assembly had quietly finished stripping the rest of his family's dignity away. That, above all, would be hardest: feeling something he hadn't felt since he was too young to know what feeling it meant.

 _Priorities_ , he reminded himself. Carefully, he locked down all knowledge of who and what he was, _really_ (Charles Xavier, once of House Xavier, like Emma said), deep down where no one but himself could find it, and picked up the keys to his car.

 

**_Now_ **

Charles had, at last, picked the lock to Erik's mind. Memories were difficult things when buried and hidden away from the light. Most people thought memories remained unchanged, frozen and perfect, like an insect in amber. But, in the dark, they _did_ change, so when the mind opened them up again and shone light on them, they rose up out of the darkness different than before. And the mind, relieved to see them again, couldn't tell the difference.

What he had found in Erik's mind… Charles swallowed heavily. He couldn't un-know it. He _had_ to act on it, he had to find the proof Emma demanded, the proof that would put the light to the fuse and set off the powder keg of scandal – or put Erik quietly into Emma's pocket, another chess piece off the board.

 _If Emma wants it_. She'd use it for her ends, Charles knew. She would hold it over Erik's head – hold it over him in a way it ought _never_ to be used, as if Erik's memories should be a source of shame, or a reason to strip him of his position.

 _I can't._ Charles stared at the top drawer of the desk. He saw the contents in Erik's mind: on top, the heavy seal of office Erik used to sign official documents, some medals from his service overseas. A few trinkets made of metal that Erik kept to play with when bored.

Underneath those, the polished panel resting against a set of springs that needed to be triggered in a certain sequence. Charles reached for the memory he had seen in Erik's head, the pattern of press-release, press-press-release that would spring the panel free and reveal what lay in the cache beneath it.

 

**_Three months ago_ **

The Emancipation Day celebration promised to be tedious, filled with more gossip and conniving than interesting conversation. It was, unfortunately, the first major event on the social calendar that the nobility were, more or less, obliged to attend. Charles had secured an invitation through yet more of Emma's invisible machinations; the pristine ivory envelope had arrived in his mailbox one day, the red-inked _RSVP_ glaring up at him as if warning him what would happen if he failed to respond.

Charles, from his vantage point in at the end of the bar, had spotted several aristocrats and more than a few obscenely rich people among the influential gentry of Genosha, the eponymous city that served as the seat and administrative center for the Duchy of Genosha. They stood on the wide skirts of the lawns and gardens beneath the castle, lit up by huge torches kindled by a pyrokinetic after the end of the fast, although a few other illuminants added their own glow to the gathering. One woman, wearing a sheath of silver-shot silk, walked like a pillar of crystal light, the nimbus of her bioluminescence surrounding her wherever she went.

Above them Magneto Keep sat astride its hill, its stone shaped by earthworkers and forged into impenetrability by, so tradition said, generations of Lehnsherrs. The keep seemed, to Charles's eyes, to grow directly out of the ground, so naturally tied to it that the eye couldn't tell where nature ended and artifice began. _The first Keep built by mutants, for mutants_ , the histories said; a human slave-fortress had been obliterated and the Keep built on top of its corpse.

Now, a few generations on, the nobility gathered in genteel debauchery beneath it, sipping wines brought from the far countries – the human countries – and delicately nibbling away at appetizers that seemed woefully inadequate to satisfy a hunger that had been brewing since before dawn.

He imagined his parents once being in a place like this, his mother glittering and resplendent in a gown and his father ill at ease in black tie, his brown hair threatening to escape from the constraints laid upon it by the stylist. They _had_ been in a place like this once, but Charles – being little and condemned to an early bedtime and a nanny – had never seen it.

Speaking of seeing… He tried to be inconspicuous about standing up on his toes to scan the gathering. One tuxedo looked more or less identical to another, and so far as he knew, the person he was looking for had no occasion to wear a dress. Lehnsherr's sexual proclivities and identities, according to Emma's dossier, did not seem to exist; Charles could almost hear Emma's vexation seething in the places where romantic liaisons should have been. Having not worked his way into the channels of gossip he hadn't heard much beyond who was _expected_ to attend, and Erik Lehnsherr had, for Emma, a distressingly bad habit of never being snared by any of the traps she had laid for him

Maybe, Charles told himself, the Duke of Genosha wasn't coming. Never mind that the Emancipation Day observances were one of the very few holidays Genoshans – with their oddly blended cultures and backgrounds – observed as one. Down in New Salem, there would be fireworks to mark the end of the day of fasting, conducted in remembrance of the long years of slavery before the Genoshans rose up and crushed their oppressors and secured their freedom. And then there would be feasting and drinking, although nothing like the buffet spread out on the massive portico behind Charles, and nothing like the quality of the wine Charles was pretending to drink.

At least the assembled aristocracy had neglected to eat very much before beginning to drink. Charles picked up a few bits of information from some of the more unguarded minds around them and filed them away, a romantic indiscretion here, a questionable financial transaction there. They might be useful.

Gods, he was starting to think like Emma.

Movement at his elbow distracted him from that unpleasant thought. Charles shifted away in order to prevent his wine from spilling all over his cuff, twisting to direct an irritated look at the man who had jostled him.

"Sorry," Erik Lehnsherr, Duke of Genosha, said, not sounding particularly apologetic. "I was hoping to get a napkin. Are you guarding them?"

"No," Charles snapped back before remembering why he was here. "I mean, no I'm not, my Lord Duke."

Lehnsherr's famous mouth – thin-lipped, expressive – curled up in a smile, exposing the edges of his teeth. Charles made himself not look away. Lehnsherr didn't read like a man who reacted well to coyness; if he had, the legions of interested men and women knocking on his bedroom door might have met with a better reception.

"How was your fast?" Lehnsherr asked. The question was ritual, perfunctory, but something in his tone suggested he honestly wanted to know.

"Not hard," Charles said. It was the correct answer. "I hope yours was easy."

"Easier than the years our ancestors endured," was Lehnsherr's answer, also correct. To claim a difficult fast was bragging; Charles's mutation made it more difficult than most, with his brain's constant demand for energy. But his identity made no mention of his telepathy, only a touch of empathy and metahuman levels of intelligence. _Not omega level, not in the least, but still impressive_ , Charles thought; in the complicated calculus of mutant abilities, anything cognitive had a strange tinge to it, more impressive than even the more flamboyant abilities.

"I hope you've eaten," Charles said, indicating the wine glass in Lehnsherr's hand. "It wouldn't do to see the Duke of Genosha staggering into people like Lady Margarethe over there."

Lehnsherr's smile grew, surprisingly turning almost honest rather than merely amused. "I ate before I came. You've been taking care of that glass," he indicated Charles's wine glass with a tilt of his chin. "Do you have a sentimental attachment to it?"

"Not as such." Charles made himself not take so much as a sip. He also didn't dare reach out to Lehnsherr. Metallokinetics and magnetics like Lehnsherr could, on occasion, sense the particular resonance of a telepath actively exercising his abilities. Emma's notes had included no information on that. For a woman who prided herself on knowing everything about everyone, her body of knowledge regarding Erik Lehnsherr was distressingly thin.

Lehnsherr's body, though… Charles could understand why Emma must have been grinding her teeth at the impossibility of Lehnsherr not stumbling into some kind of sexual impropriety she could use for her own ends. He was tall, lean – _rangy_ would be the word – with the promise of powerful but spare muscles underneath his dress jacket and pristine white shirt. His shoulders looked even more impossible in person than they did in the numerous photographs in print and online, running down to a narrow waist and hips. All those photographs should have had someone else in the frame with him, hanging off his arm and smiling at him or the camera… but they didn't, and Emma's assignment required Charles to, somehow, become that person.

Cautiously, Charles let his empathy off its leash. Right away, Lehnsherr became more vibrant, his body filled out now with emotions and the hints of thoughts connected to them. Charles had worked his way through very many novels written by psionics, and in the more ridiculous ones the romantic interest _burned_ or _sang_ or did something similarly improbable-sounding – but now, confronted with the storm of irritation, intrigue, pride, and satisfaction, Charles had to admit that Lehnsherr's mind (even the most muted impressions of it, like looking at it through foggy, marbled glass)… well, it _burned_ , with a clarity like pale fire or clear water.

This, Charles reminded himself, was not the time to fall in love. Or even like. Or anything.

"I haven't been to one of these since I was much younger," he said, banking on the party being a way of starting conversation. "Are they usually this entertaining?"

Lehnsherr snorted. "For a given value of entertaining." He glanced at Charles, an appraising once-over that took in Charles's tuxedo, his skin, his eyes – his mouth, Charles realized with a start. "I don't recall seeing you at any of Shaw's observances."

"I was across the nation for university when I turned ten," Charles said. That, actually, had been true. "And then graduate school. Our celebrations tended to be a little… different."

"More bad alcohol and pizza?" Lehnsherr asked. Humor lit his face up, transforming it from forbidding to warmth, to something Charles might approach. "I remember my first tour overseas... it was a bit different from what I'd been used to. "

"It sounds better than watching Lady Margarethe try to dance in that dress," Charles said. "At school, we had to spend all day – morning to night – with the hall monitor watching us, to make sure we didn't cheat. If you had a good hall monitor, they'd sneak in candy to help the younger kids. Or," Charles winced, "that's how it seemed when I was eleven."

" _And we will raise our children in the ways of justice_ ," Lehnsherr murmured, the catechism falling off his tongue smoothly. He could, Charles decided, listen to Lehnsherr talk forever.

At that moment, Lehnsherr decided to fall silent, thoughtfully scanning the assembly. Charles would have expected the ranking noble – the King was away at his retreat this year, likely recovering from another difficult year of oppressing lower-caste mutants and baselines – to be inundated with petitions and pleas for attention, but Lehnsherr had an aura to him that seemed to repel unwanted advances. Which, so far as Charles could see, were all advances: counts, countesses, earls, a smattering of landed gentry all drifted by at the edge of being caught in Lehnsherr's orbit before veering away. Sometimes they directed a respectful nod at the Duke, but they rarely paused that long. Only Charles seemed to be the exception, and why that might be, he had no idea.

 _Exploit that_ , he told himself. With his telepathy, he would have known how to do it, sussing out the chinks in Lehnsherr's armor. But now he only had himself and not his telepathy, and while Francis Pembroke would have known what to do, what calculated risks to take, because this was why he existed – this very moment and whatever he could gain from it – Charles Xavier did not.

"I didn't ask your name," Lehnsherr said into Charles's consternation.

"Francis Pembroke." The name came to Charles's lips effortlessly, naturally. It belonged to the man whose body Charles felt himself inhabiting, polished and perfectly pressed in an expensive tuxedo, the silver ring of an educated urban mutant on his right thumb. "And I – I hope it wouldn't be presumptuous to say that I don't need to know your name."

"No," Lehnsherr said, tone turning frosty. "No, it isn't."

Those were the last words the Duke of Genosha said to Francis Pembroke for the night. The party dragged on, a hallucination of lights and over-cheerful voices, food and drink flowing in quantities that, once he began to think about it, made Charles a little sick. Back home, he, Raven, and Darwin would have fasted, then made dinner – or Darwin would have gone to his mysterious boyfriend's, as he'd been suggesting – and it wouldn't have been much, only the three of them in Charles's apartments over the practice, but they would have laughed and Raven would have said she'd have been better off fasting than eating Charles's cooking, but he'd have known she didn't mean it.

The tide of partygoers eventually pulled Lehnsherr away from him. Charles felt some of his awareness go with Lehnsherr, as if tethered to him, following the beacon of his mind into the crowd that heaved and cheered around him. He considered, briefly, reaching in to steal whatever information he could, to take it back to Emma and play dumb and tell her he had what she wanted. _I have something you can hold over Erik Lehnsherr's head. Take it and leave me alone forever_.

But… _Concrete proof_ , Emma had said. _I'm not in this for idle rumors, Dr. Xavier. I'm in this for the absolute certainty I can control whomever I must in order to get whatever I need._

Before his thoughts could darken everything and ruin whatever slight bit of regard Lehnsherr had for him – as, probably, a young man (some years younger than Lehnsherr, or so Lehnsherr thought; this, Charles told himself, would help) who was earnest, observant, not so star-struck as to be obsequious. He had _met_ the Duke, and that counted for something. For rather a lot, given how many failed attempts Emma had made at insinuating someone into Lehnsherr's most intimate circles.

 _That's something you'd like_. Charles could almost hear Raven making a snickering comment about _being in Lehnsherr's circle_.

Well, it was true.

Charles began to make his way through the congregation of silks and furs to the gate leading out of the garden and down to the gravel paths and the valets. Lehnsherr was alone atop the portico behind the lawn on which the party had gathered, mind a subdued, reflective glow. For a moment Charles considered going back to him, to begin their conversation again, somehow, but – no. No; Francis Pembroke wouldn't press his advantage past the breaking point. He had appointments at the archives tomorrow, and Francis Pembroke could be patient.

That, Charles figured, and he didn't want to think about what further conversation with Lehnsherr would mean.

He made his escape without interruption, a few flickers of telepathy to keep away a young blond man whose attention, for some reason, Charles had attracted. Other than nearly colliding with a brunette on his way through the door, he encountered no one else; she barely glanced at him, or even acknowledged him besides a perfunctory "excuse me" before continuing on her way. The valet accepted his ticket with a superciliousness that nettled him more than it should have, the little bit of wine he'd had mixing with his bad temper and brewing its way into a headache. At least, early as it was, the traffic would be light; everyone else would be at their own parties, celebrating the end of the day and the beginning of their history alike.

At last he stumbled into the quiet of his penthouse – _No, not your penthouse, Emma's penthouse, Francis Pembroke's penthouse –_ and navigated his way to bed. Patterns like fireworks swam across his vision, and just behind them, his encounter with Lehnsherr lurked as if lying in wait for Charles to acknowledge what, exactly, he was supposed to do.

It was a small mercy, he decided two weeks later, after he had made the acquaintance of the librarians in the archives and started something that might pass for legitimate research, that he hadn't once seen the Duke since festival night.

 

**_Now_ **

Charles pulled the box out of the cache underneath the false bottom of the drawer. It was metal, of course, and had no seam or joint that he could see. It was also not solid; Charles heard, faintly, the shifting of its contents inside it, and the box weighed less than it should have, if it were iron through and through. Feeling over the surface, he found no secret catch.

Of course, Erik was a metallokinetic. The box, entrusted with his secret, would be something only he could access. Charles checked quickly for the pulse of Erik’s sleeping mind; it still throbbed quietly, although with a discontent threading through it like off-key notes.

Before he could allow himself to think more about it, Charles wiped the box off with the edge of his robe and tucked it back in its cache. Repeating the sequence of press-and-release snapped the false bottom back into its place, and a moment's work, and his photographic memory, sufficed to place the contents of the drawer in their precise places. Not a minute later, he was out of his robe and back in bed, with Erik's body curving around him and Erik's mind smoothing out back into sleep again.

 _I can't do this_ , Charles told himself and the dark ceiling. Outside, the sun was just touching the horizon, a red-gold sliver of it coming up over Hammer Bay. He turned over in Erik's arms and watched it rise.

 

**_Two months ago_ **

A note had appeared in Charles's apartment, waiting for him when he returned from yet another trip to the archives. He recognized the plain but heavy-woven linen envelope, and the small bump that was a DNA-recognition chip and transponder. Emma would know the second he, or anyone, picked up the envelope. She would also know if he'd read it.

_One meeting is all well and good, but progress would be better. I heard that G.M. may be facing problems with her lease._

Charles set the note down, and sat himself down a moment later. He had his cell phone in his bag; he could call Raven or Darwin and ask them. He could reach out to them – the distance across Genosha was no difficulty for him, no more a tax on him than reaching to touch someone on the shoulder – or he could… He could lose Graymalkin – the G.M. of the note – altogether. He shut his eyes against the possibility, but it remained stubbornly before his sight.

The note had more, and a thin slip of tissue-like paper embossed with copper writing. It needed two fingers and rather more dexterity than Charles felt capable of to pick up.

_Included is your invitation to a small gathering tomorrow evening at the residence of Janos Quested, his ducal lordship's lieutenant in the late wars. L. is expected to be in attendance, as are you. Dress less like an academic, would you, dearest?_

_As ever, your obedient servant &c._

"Fuck." The word burst out of him and rang loud and obscene in the silence of the apartment. If Raven had been there, she would have laughed at Charles and his unbreakable self-control giving way to cursing; Darwin would have winced and asked what was going on. Now, only the quiet answered back, and his own flushed, angry face in the mirror above the buffet.

 _Raven and Darwin need you. The kids need you_ , he reminded himself. They both knew – at least in some vague sense – about the bargain Charles had struck with Emma to keep Graymalkin open. Raven, who had known a bit about the money Charles had exhausted to clear his reputation and Charles's stubbornness, had first tried to convince him to give up. That one argument Charles hated reliving; that had been the first time since childhood he had shouted at her – that, even worse, he had told her to leave, if she refused to help.

She had stayed. Darwin, one of Charles's first students and one who had simply never left for reasons Darwin considered abundantly clear even if he never explained them, had stayed as well. 

If he gave up, they would have nothing. Emma would take the rest of Charles's assets as forfeit, and Charles doubted she cared enough about impoverished mutants to keep the Institute open, even if having the opportunity to keep him – the scion of a once-great house – under her thumb as a paid subordinate might have some entertainment value.

Those thoughts kept him company throughout the night and into the next day. The routine of the morning went from one step to another, coffee and breakfast, a walk to the archives, where a huge, blue, and diffident young man, Henry, handed him his tablets from the previous day's work. He had shadows in the back of his mind – a past shame regarding his _metahuman_ feet, a failed experiment that had now cursed ( _blessed_ , society would say) him with blue fur and a smile more canine than not. Charles ignored the shadows as best he could, and resolutely did not wonder about what might have been if Henry had come to the Institute, or if he hadn't been so overwhelmed by the _demand_ that he embrace his mutation that he'd shied away from it.

That talk barely had acceptance in the communities Charles had settled in; here, in the heart of the capitol, with the history of Genosha's rise from oppression spread out around them, it might verge on heretical.

With a last _good-morning_ to Henry, Charles took his tablets and books and made his way through the vast, echoing marble halls to the reading room, moving under the watchful gazes of the first families of Genosha – and avoiding, as best he could, the gaze of a long-dead Xavier, with her sharp blue eyes. Others marched in rank alongside her: Shaws, Lehnsherrs, Braddocks, Shaaras, Munroes, all in different styles and different dress, but all with the same superiority about them, the sort that belonged to a proud people who had won through and conquered those who had dominated them.

Bent over his possessions as he was, and with his telepathy still reined in against detection, he didn't see the swift-moving shadow coming from one of the anterooms until it was too late.

"My lord," Charles said once he'd recovered, and made sure that the data tablets were in no danger of crashing to the floor. "I – I'm quite sorry. I didn't see you."

"So I could tell," Lehnsherr said. He gazed down at Charles with the same inscrutable distance as the paintings behind him. "You are – " he hesitated. "Francis Pembroke."

"Yes," Charles said. Was it a good thing or bad that Lehnsherr seemed to half-remember him? If the former, perhaps he could start over; Lehnsherr's iciness at their first meeting still stung. He reached out only a little, allowing his empathy to slide through Lehnsherr's mind like fingers feeling out the texture of an unfamiliar object. It was indifferent but, at the same time, engaged; he was _examining_ Charles, placing him in this new context.

"I'm keeping you from your work," Lehnsherr said after a moment, and stepped out of Charles's path, leaving the way clear to the large walnut doors of the reading room. "Have a good day, Mr. Pembroke."

"That went well," Charles said to his tablets. "I can't wait to see how tonight goes."

 

**_Now_ **

For the third time in his life and the third time in as many months – and so three more times than Charles had ever thought likely – Charles found himself standing outside the huge pile of white stone and sculpture that formed Riptide House, the home of Janos Quested.

Quested's house sat on the hill leading up to Magneto Keep, a large, Greek-columned house with money hidden in the Spartan lines and furnishings inside it. Charles handed his coat to the robotic servant and accepted its invitation to stand still a moment while it scanned his face and entered it into its memory banks for coat-retrieval purposes. The single huge eye reminded Charles uncomfortably of the Sentinels – he had spent the morning looking at old news reports of the things – and it was only when the robot turned away that he felt he could breathe properly.

He passed down a long, marble hall (more marble statues in niches, the mottled white and grey relieved only by gold or the rich purple of the Questeds' house colors), and into a sitting room that was all paneled oak and heavy carpets. It was enough like the study at the old house that Charles hesitated, caught out for a moment by memory, half-expecting to see his three-year-old self playing on the floor by the desk, to see his father materialize behind it, tapping thoughtfully away at his papers.

 _That's gone now_. His father had died years ago, the house caught in the clutches of the state for Brian Xavier's heresy. He made himself turn away and follow the sudden burst of conversation out onto the terrace.

The party had arranged itself on one of the porticos overlooking the foothills of the Genosha range, with its trees and rolling fields marching swiftly up to the mountaintop keep of the Lehnsherr family. Quested himself stood proprietarily in the corner, sipping a drink around a smile at something Captain Elizabeth Braddock said.

Charles made sure of his own shields. The Psylocke line were, with few exceptions, telepaths; they did not have the strength of Charles's own line, but a moment's inattention might see the slim, psionic blade that was Elizabeth's primary ability slide in between his defenses like a knife into ribs. He was half-tempted to leave his mind splayed open, instead of the innocuous camouflage of _simple scholar in town for research_ , and get the charade over with.

"Ah, Professor Pembroke," Quested said, his dark eyes fixing on Charles from across the room. "You've torn yourself away from your books today, I see."

"All work, et cetera," Charles replied with a bow. "I'm thankful to you, as always, for dragging me out of it." By way of answer, Quested indicated with his chin that Charles should go to the bar and make a drink for himself.

Half a neat whiskey later, Lehnsherr entered, an impatient _sit down_ gesture for the few people who had half-risen from their seats in respect. Charles, struggling to keep silent in the face of the current conversation – a proposed deportation of human sympathizers and _Zeeds_ (the slang for CCD sufferers) to the island colony of Avalon – found himself taken off-guard and, rather than nodding deferentially at Lehnsherr, glaring at him.

"Have I done something wrong?" Lehnsherr asked mockingly. He had caught Charles's expression, and rather than being offended, seemed amused. Despite his shields, Charles overheard the wisp of a thought, half-formed, that Charles had not changed – that he looked (something Charles could not decipher) in his cardigan and trousers, with a look on his face like one Erik remembered from an impatient tutor.

"No, my lord," Charles said. "I was – thinking."

"You've been doing that a lot," Captain Braddock said. "I'm starting to think we're boring the good professor."

"I can't help it, I'm afraid." Charles tried to laugh; Braddock and the others murmured humorously in reply. "By all means, don't let my thinking interrupt."

They didn't, the conversation flowing on like a stream only briefly stopped by a rock. His parents' parties had been much like this, a babble of empty if animated talk – necessary, his mother had said, to grease the wheels of House Xavier's interests, and to glean any useful information from guests who had left their minds unguarded. If there was any _information_ to be found, it slipped and spilled through Charles's ineffectual fingers.

While Charles tried not to explode with indignity and frustration, Lehnsherr had gone to the bar to pour himself a drink – whiskey, neat. Charles half-expected him to go to Quested, who was, by all accounts, one of the duke's few friends. Somehow, Charles thought as he watched Lehnsherr covertly, he was expected to pierce the reserve that Lehnsherr wore about him like armor.

 _You make friends with suspicious people; you disarm them_ , Emma had said once, in an interview long ago. _That can be as useful as your telepathy_. 

Instead of engaging Quested in conversation, the duke turned away from the bar and, after scanning the assembled company, joined Charles at the periphery of the conversation.

"I hope," Lehnsherr said, "your research today was productive."

"Yes, my lord." Charles hesitated, and then added, "I was able to get access to some of the manuscript diaries from the first colonists." One of the first slaves, he meant; despite the tightness with which Genosha's memory clung to their long-ago oppression, thinking of their ancestors as _slaves_ was curiously – and infuriatingly, to Charles – verboten. The language of schoolbooks spoke around the word, as if embarrassed by it. "It had been written by a young woman, a terrakinetic, who had been in charge of a camp near here when she was liberated. She aided in the building of Magneto Keep, after the original building," a barracks for the slaves who worked in the mountain mines, "had been razed."

Lehnsherr raised an eyebrow and sipped his drink. Around them, the conversation drifted on aimlessly, circling into the upcoming Parliamentary session. Quested laughed softly in response to something Captain Braddock said. After a moment, Lehnsherr said, "And this is for a book, is it?"

"I hope so." A book that would never be published. "On the structure of society in the first days of the Kingdom. "You know, it's really quite fascinating. Lucinda Carey – the terrakinetic – also helped to establish the guilds, as a way of organizing citizens so they could best rebuild after the liberation. Mutants were organized into guilds in order to best assess what talent was available, and where it could be allocated to best purpose. We've moved beyond those now, of course, but…" He trailed off, the weight of Lehnsherr's gaze resting on him with an uncomfortable keenness. "I'm sorry, my Lord."

"Are we having lecture tonight?" Captain Braddock asked with a laugh. The woman sitting next to her, Allison Blaire – a musician, Charles remembered – laughed as well. "It would make up for the times I fell asleep during Genoshan History. I think my professor's ability was boring his students to death."

"Blaire," Lehnsherr snapped. The laughter died out quickly. "Continue, Professor Pembroke, if you would."

"She was a remarkable woman," Charles said. Lucinda had married at thirty-two, to one of the humans who had aided the rebellion, and borne three children, all mutants. Humans sat in the background of many mutant families, unacknowledged; in the registers, their abilities were entered as _unknown_ , if their presence was noted at all. "She moved to Westchester, to help with soil enrichment – Westchester had been almost a wasteland, after strip-mining, remember – and she became a representative in the second and third sessions of Parliament. I suppose she couldn't stay out of politics."

"Is she in your family tree?" Lehnsherr asked, taking a sip of whiskey.

Genealogical knowledge was highly prized, of course. Charles had known his family tree backwards and forwards by the time he'd turned seven. To trace his heritage back to the Founding was hardly exceptional – many families could, for the registers kept detailed records on mutations and family lines – but to be able to recite it meant connection, meant pride. Charles, with his transhuman memory, did not feel particularly connected to Francesca Xavier in her painting.

"She isn't," Charles said, which was true enough. "A very distant relative through some also-distant cousins is the closest I come."

"Hm." The conversation perched on a precarious ledge, with Lehnsherr falling back into taciturnity again. Charles finished his whiskey and was debating getting another when Lehnsherr said, "Have you enjoyed your time in the capital so far? I've heard through some acquaintances," Charles suspected Lehnsherr meant _gossip_ but was too proud to say it, "that you've been some time Away."

Was Lehnsherr interrogating him? With those hawk-like grey eyes, fixed immovably on Charles, and the heavy emphasis on _Away_ , the sensation was hard to escape. _In the human lands_ , Lehnsherr meant, as nearly everyone did who spoke about _Away_. There was Genosha, and Away, and no bridge between them. Emma had doctored his return papers, passport, and visa, even the reams of customs forms required, and had information that kept one of the customs officials under her thumb so Charles's paperwork had gone through the bureaucracy while Charles had sat, wholly unknowing, in his office in Graymalkin.

"A few years," Charles said, as if admitting to something scandalous. "I'm very glad to be back. The human lands were interesting, but Westchester is home to me."

That second part, at least, was true. He had been born and grown up in the province, but New Salem sat in the farthest corner of it, bedraggled and half-dead; the land had never recovered from centuries of mining, or from the battle that had been waged over it for control of the ore the mines produced.

"I'm surprised you haven't returned home," Lehnsherr remarked. "When I was in the army, I spent as much time in the Keep as I could when they let me out on leave."

"Research waits for no man," Charles laughed. "And I think if I were to go home, I'd never want to leave it again. I wouldn't get anything done."

"Here's to nostalgia," said Blaire, who had been eavesdropping. A few others echoed her toast and drank.

Lehnsherr scowled and then said, with the peremptoriness Charles had learned to associate with the nobility, "Tell me more of your research."

Charles did, grateful that this, at least, was something he didn't have to lie about. He described the archives, the sensation of touching the old papers and organics that the colonists had written on – _It's been nearly eight hundred years, and still the writing is so crisp, so clear. I find it remarkable that someone had taken the words in their head and set them to paper that she must have stolen or reused, with a pen she carved herself, or stole from her overseers. She knew her thoughts were important enough for the risks she took._ Distantly, he knew he was speaking ill-advisedly, and perhaps treading too close to breaking convention, but he found he didn't care. _There are so many ways we echo, in a far-off way, what our ancestors did. Our institutions, our language, our ways of thinking… You can see the seeds in it in what they wrote._

As he spoke, he became aware that Lehnsherr was watching him still, but with warmth instead of the chilly disdain that had greeted Charles on their first few interactions. The tight precision in Lehnsherr's body had unfolded, leaving him very nearly relaxed, a long stretched almost carelessly across the back of the couch, his body turned toward Charles and leaning in, as if attracted by Charles's words. Again that wisp of thought came, dispelled quickly but solid enough this time for Charles to catch.

 _He looks so different from that first night_ , was Lehnsherr's thought. Images of Charles swam up, one of him in his tuxedo and tie, adrift on a sea of strangers and clearly anxious to be away; and now this Charles, in his comfortable old clothes, forgetting about the glass in his hand as he gestured his way through history, his hair slightly disarranged and his eyes very bright in the muted refinement of Quested's study.

Charles caught himself and pulled his words up short. "I apologize, your grace," he said. "I get – caught up."

"Don't," Lehnsherr said gruffly. He glanced at a massive clock on the wall. "You've made the last half-hour pass a bit less tediously, at least."

"One does what one can," Charles murmured.

It startled a laugh out of Lehnsherr, an unexpectedly warm, spontaneous sound. Like his voice, it was light on top with a soft growl underneath. It could be tantalizing; you could hear a promise in it.

"Pardon me for observing," Charles began, ready to risk more than was probably wise, and whether it was the drink or Lehnsherr's abrupt warmth, he didn't know, "but you don't seem to be… well, entirely happy here. I was under the impression we're all among friends, yet you've let me monopolize you."

Lehnsherr's thin lips twitched before compressing in an attempt at sternness. "My friends and I mostly had the army in common. There isn't much to keep us together besides that." Charles caught the wistfulness, Lehnsherr reaching for something he had never had but yet wanted with a guilt-tinged longing. "When we returned from our tour, I went to the Keep to take my mother's place, and Quested," Lehnsherr raised his voice a little, "went on to build his wine cellar."

"For which," Charles said into the general laughter, "we're all grateful, I'm sure."

"Here, here," said Captain Braddock. Blaire added a toast of her own.

"One does what one can," Quested said, the old Genoshan phrase dropping off his lips with becoming modesty. Charles wondered if Quested, if anyone, knew that the phrase had come from the slave-times, or if that bit of knowledge, too, had died away. Quested, gesturing expansively with his own half-empty glass, continued, "I've found it useful for trapping people into coming back. It especially seems to work on musicians," Blaire laughed, "and historians."

This was said with a nod of Quested's dark head to Charles.

Charles tensed, his telepathy on alert enough to catch the interest threaded through Quested's words. He kept the tension off his face as best he could and said, "You've discovered our universal weakness, I see. Although why you want to keep a scholar around, I'm not entirely sure."

"Appearances," Lehnsherr interrupted dourly. "You've been _away_ , so you haven't had a chance to become someone's pet student."

He sounded almost… Charles hid his consternation in his mostly-empty glass. Lehnsherr sounded _jealous_. With his telepathy muffled as it was, he could barely pick out the spiky texture of Lehnsherr's thoughts. He'd known that the Genoshan elite patronized artists, philosophers, authors, scholars, musicians, scientists – his own family had done it; his mother had presided, cool and glittering, over a weekly salon up until the government had descended on them – but he hadn't thought that this might be turned to his advantage.

Lehnsherr, though, didn't feel particularly interested in Charles's research.

Quested was saying something about the dangers of keeping tame historians, accompanied by the laughter of Captain Braddock and Blaire. Charles forced himself to attend to it.

"Well?" Quested asked. "What do you say, Pembroke? Full patronage, all the alcohol you can drink…?"

"I think I've had all the alcohol I can drink for tonight," Charles said. Lehnsherr's satisfaction washed against him, and _oh_ , that was nearly as heady as the whiskey, spinning Charles's brain away from what was safe and to much more dangerous places.

He made his excuses quickly, fumbling more like the scholar and less like the dependable son of Genoshan respectability Emma had created as his cover. Braddock and Blaire's laughter followed him out of the room – he replied to them, with what he couldn't say – and so did, to Charles's consternation, Lehnsherr. The duke moved like a silent, stalking shadow, a presence sat in the corner of Charles's mental eye.

"Am I a good enough excuse to get you away from your friends?" Charles didn't look back over his shoulder.

Lehnsherr snorted. "A very good one, if you must know." The words paused, although Lehnsherr's footsteps did not; they only quickened, a few quick strides to bring him alongside Charles. "Are you really going to make me ask it, then?"

"Ask what?" Charles's throat and chest had suddenly gone tight. He retrieved his coat from the robot.

"I thought it would have been obvious, with you an empath," Lehnsherr said. His hand was on Charles's arm now, hot and heavy through his jacket, bringing Charles to a stop despite Lehnsherr not exerting any pressure to slow him down. It was natural to look from Lehnsherr's hand – its long fingers, some a few times broken, the veins and intricate topography of his wrists cut off by crisp white cuffs – up and up to Lehnsherr's face, somber and determined in the moonlight of a Genoshan summer.

"Come with me," Lehnsherr whispered, the words softly intimate, reaching out to catch Charles and close around him, unawares.

"All right."

* * *

"You're still here," Erik said. _And you're awake already_ , he didn't say. From the tone of the words, spoke and unspoken, Charles knew he'd transgressed – that Erik hadn't expected him to stay.

"I'm not in the habit of one-night stands," Charles replied. "Do you want me to go?"

"Please." Erik pushed himself up in bed, a distracting length of muscle, and, despite his nudity, still commanding. Charles refused to be commanded, or at least to be commanded in such a way as to negate his dignity, and responded to the single word with a single shrug and slid out of bed slowly. His robe hit the floor as he reached for his clothes, and Erik – Lehnsherr; the Duke – sighed.

Silence soaked the duke's bedchamber along with the sunlight and, to Charles's anger, the keen memories of the two of them twined together last night. He hurt, bruised and deliciously sore, and he'd drunk deep from Erik's lust and satisfaction – and, Charles thought, with a twist of heartache, all his secrets, laid bare when he'd collapsed on top of Charles, breathing hard and staring at him so that everything he was, everything he hid, was all out there on the surface for Charles to see.

It was, Charles decided, better that he go. Any more of those memories and he'd tell Lehnsherr everything. He hurried on the rest of his clothes and collected his coat – forgotten just inside the bedchamber; Lehnsherr had refused to bother the staff – and had his hand on the handle of the door when Lehnsherr spoke up.

"Francis," he said, and it was only when Charles turned around (needing the moment to recall his name), "Quested's offer to serve as your patron… don't take it."

Charles frowned. "Is that a decree, my Lord?"

"Accept mine instead." Lehnsherr fixed him with a steady gaze, piercing and hypnotic; it drew Charles almost out of himself, affixing his mind to Lehnsherr's and pulling it under, as if Charles were drowning. "You'll have access to the Lehnsherr archives, my protection and my word on your behalf with the stationers and censors when you go to publish. Money, if you want it."

That Lehnsherr was offering him _this_ , full access to his family's history, in light of what Charles knew now, struck him as deeply bitterly ironic. With an effort, he kept back the equally bitter laugh and said, "Is this usually how you propose a new intellectual relationship? On the back of a sexual one?"

"Take it or not," Lehnsherr growled. "Which is it?"

Emma would find out about this; she'd turn Charles's position into pressure to find out _something_. But… while Lehnsherr proposed to protect him, maybe Charles could return the favor. Somehow. Other, more dangerous, thoughts would have to wait until he was back in the safety of his own apartment.

That safety felt far away. He gave Lehnsherr his answer – "Yes" – and fled before Lehnsherr could detain him any longer.

It was only at home, behind the safety of his shields, that he allowed himself to pull up the memories of the previous night.

A tangle of limbs, Lehnsherr's mouth demanding on his, and giving too when Charles had demands of his own. Lehnsherr's hands, expertly stripping Charles of his cardigan and shirt, sliding across his belly, a fingernail tracing beneath his navel to draw a shiver out of him. Lehnsherr's _body_ , god help him, Charles thought, a tapestry of fine-woven muscle under skin that bore scars and freckles that were delights to kiss. Lehnsherr turning him over, his mouth trailing down Charles's spine, pausing at the hollow of his back before continuing lower – 

No, the box. In his memory, Charles reached into Erik's head, his telepathy sliding in like a scalpel to excise another set of memories. They presented themselves in a casket, a plain metal box without hinge or joint or seam, and in those memories, Charles was Erik, Charles was Erik who called up his power and opened the casket to reveal –

Photographs, old and faded, shadowy grays where black used to be and yellow in the place of white, the corners dog-eared. Beneath them, letters, written in a brisk, light hand, as if the fingers hurried the pen along and refused to permit it to linger. The photos are of a man, or a man and a woman, he tall and dark-haired with pale eyes that fix the camera with an uncompromising gaze; she with a wide mouth given to smiles, tall and spare – not a great beauty by any standards, but compelling.

On the reverse of the photo of the man: _J.E., for E.L._

A letter in that brisk hand: _I know the impossibility, but I still wish for it. You owe your duty to your people, of course, and you would hardly be fully welcome in my world (or I in yours), yet all I can think of is you coming to live in Germania with me, you with little Erik, my darling boy. He's so big already. I feel as if a father's love should make it possible for me to be by his side in more than my dreams, or carry him to me – even if my love for you could not make that dream a reality. I have never once lamented my humanity, until now. Your beloved and loving, J._

Charles stretched out on his own bed. It seemed the only way to exist with this knowledge: to let it settle into him, into every space between his marrow and the blood in his veins.

Erik's father was a _human_.

The Duchess's husband had died during her pregnancy; she had given birth to her son and heir – and her only child – as a widow. She had never remarried, and had worn black the rest of her days despite the mutterings about excessive sensibility, for the Lehnsherr line was a powerful one, and its continuance should not have been left on the shoulders of a single boy. That, the critics said, and it had been well-known the Duchess and her husband had not loved each other; the match had been, as all marriages among the great lines of Genosha were, for the genetic potential of its offspring.

That the Duchess had taken a lover did not surprise. Everyone did it. So long as no bastards resulted, the laws said, fidelity was not enjoined. But a _human_ lover, and a child as a result of that union….

Charles's gut tightened. Erik could lose everything if even a hint of this were generally known. The laws were strict on that as well: no first-generation or human-born mutant could hold any title of nobility, whether that title reached back to Genosha's first days or had been created by the King – and, with the stripping of his title, went his lands, his money, maybe his life.

 _This is what you've wanted_ , a cynical voice said. It reminded Charles uncomfortably of Emma. The fallacy of relying on the genealogies in the archives, the tying of status and merit to one's mutation and the ability to control it, the creation of a society that oppressed the _less-worthy_ and was blind to its oppression… He could, if he exposed Lehnsherr, expose that. _A human-born mutant led our armies, protected our interests, and served as lord and patron ever since he gained the dukedom as his own. How could you think that any mutant, regardless of birth or ability, is inherently less capable of great things?_

Raven would point out that prejudice did not work like that. His adopted little sister had come to his family as a stray, hounded from her own family for her less-than-dependable control over her shapeshifting. _They'll think he's the exception. And they'll strip him of his titles anyway, because it's easier to do that – to silence him – than to admit they were wrong._

And to expose Erik, to hold him up to public scorn… _You would be a hypocrite, wouldn't you? And you would demand that the laws treat him with the same injustice as they treat your patients._ Counter-argument: _But to let him hide – to benefit where so many others suffer, and to allow him the ability to treat others cruelly… is that worse? Is that hypocrisy deeper?_

Instead of the answer he was hoping for, a knock sounded on his apartment door – three quick raps, and then the coldly crystalline tap of fingers against his mental shields. 

_Darling, I know you're awake, and I know where you've been_ , said Emma Frost.

Sighing, Charles forced himself up and wandered back through the alien luxury of his apartment, aware once again that none of this was his, that it had been provided for a very specific purpose. The provider of that purpose had, of course, let herself in, and stood composed and pure white in the middle of the atrium.

"It looks as if you had an eventful night," Emma said with a smirk that took in the faint bruises on Charles's neck and yesterday's half-undone and mis-buttoned shirt. "I take it my repeated invitations to Quested's little soirees have finally paid off."

"Prurience doesn't suit you, Emma," Charles told her. That met with an elegant shrug that dropped Emma's ivory-white wrap on the floor. Sighing, Charles picked it up and disposed it on the coatrack; the movement allowed Emma to sidestep him and wander into his apartment, idly-yet-pointedly inspecting the furnishings and decorations.

"Angel did lovely work," she murmured, touching the corner of an ancient Genoshan landscape. "I'm sure Lehnsherr's spies found nothing out of place here… The boring apartment of a rather boring Genoshan academic. Of course," she turned to fix those icy blue eyes of hers on him, "he finds you anything but, doesn't he?"

"Since you know what we got up to last night, I won't dignify that question with an answer."

Emma laughed delicately. "I'm sure it was delightful. And I'm sure _you_ know that I want to know if you have any revelations that don't pertain to Lehnsherr's prowess in bed."

"Nothing," Charles said, offering her his blandest expression, a half-smile sitting _just so_ at the corner of his mouth, eyes tranquil. To shield specific thoughts without making it seem he was shielding was, fortunately, a skill he had developed in the endless interrogations that had taken up years of his life. "Unless you consider his taking a biologically male lover with no reproductive mutation while still heirless as worthy of your time."

The scowl marring Emma's immaculate lips told him it wasn't. Lehnsherr was young and his bloodline famously prepotent; barring catastrophe, he had years yet to get some consort with a child suitable to inherit his title. 

"It's only been a few months," Charles said and, to distract her from hunting around his shields, looking for the telling flaw, said, "He's offered me his patronage. Access to the family archives, protection, sponsorship."

He saw the instant Emma fixed on the archives. "That might be profitable," she said, reluctant on the surface but elated enough to let some of her scheming slip through. The archives could be a start; Charles might be able to find his way to other, more valuable documents than family letters and dusty old accounts of various Lehnsherr exploits throughout the ages.

 _The letters you want aren't in the archives_ , Charles thought behind his shields, still keeping that neutral expression fixed. Aloud, he said, "Well, should I take it?"

"Of course you should," Emma snapped. She tapped her fingers on the polished tabletop at her elbow, as close to visible impatience as Charles had ever seen her. "Not that he'll have anything useful left out in the open, but it does give you more time in the house."

 _More time in his bed_ , was what Emma meant. Charles, while not usually given to embarrassment when it came to sex, blushed. That got an icy laugh. "That's what happens when you eavesdrop, Mr. Pembroke."

"Perhaps, Ms. Frost," Charles said, with ice of his own, "you ought to remember your own warning."

* * *

Lehnsherr's patronage of him began much as their relationship had, with Lehnsherr making an acerbic remark – "I hope your day wasn't too exciting," when Charles finally stumbled out of the wing of the Keep that housed the family records. It continued in that vein for some time, with Charles trapped in Lehnsherr's orbit at parties and salons, on the outskirts of a glittering company, as if that night together ( _as if what you discovered_ , Charles thought) had never happened.

Charles found himself at yet another of Quested's salons, which bid fair to become one of the most popular of the year. That night's speaker had been Dr. Henry McCoy, the same Henry Charles knew from the national archives, speaking on a new invention, an "image-inducer," as he called it, meant to aid in espionage. He found himself torn between fascination at what Henry said and what he did not (that he did not wish to look in the mirror and see this blue, fanged face, but the one he had grown up with), and boredom with the patriotic mutterings of the more vocal of the lot.

Now, though, Lehnsherr had taken up his usual station, and usual, prickly silence, at Charles's side, apparently more engrossed in his drink than anything else, but still shaping the atmosphere around them in such a way as to repel most of the other people in the room from approaching him. Charles felt himself obliged to keep quiet to humor his patron, despite having rather a lot to say on McCoy's talk and intellectual masturbation – _a sterile pursuit; it produces nothing of value except pleasure in its own right_ – and would have kept quiet if it weren't for a voice raised in bright, saber-like mockery.

"Where _did_ you get her, Janos?" Charles didn't recognize the voice, but it had a hardness that reminded him of Emma, and a viciousness that cut. Its owner was decidedly not Emma; despite being both tall and elegant, she wore a red dress of impressive volume, folds and drapes spilling in wild profusion across the floor. Anastasia, he recalled, an aerokinetic related to Quested, although not in his direct line, in town on the hunt for a suitable husband.

"She came from New Salem," Quested replied as he poured another drink.

"I didn't know you were that hard up for cash," someone else said, and the rest of the room – save Charles, Lehnsherr, and the unfortunate topic of conversation – laughed.

The topic of conversation was a young woman, a maid by her dress, with mottled green skin and short, slick reddish hair, so like Raven the resemblance struck Charles to his core. And right now she was dripping on the carpet – water, a hydromorph, not fully in control of her abilities. Under her starched dress and apron, her skin had gone translucent, her muscles, bones, and veins as liquid and insubstantial as the wine on the tray she held in her shaking hand.

Another person in the room didn't laugh, a woman with brown hair and hawklike dark eyes. "I don't see why this is amusing."

"You wouldn't, of course, Ambassador MacTaggert," said the red-bedecked woman with a disdain that grated even on Charles's long-enduring nerves. "Perhaps you should limit yourself to _diplomacy_ and not cultural tourism."

Lehnsherr growled something impatient half under his breath, but said nothing else. The maid hurriedly put down her tray, nearly spilling the drinks, and fled the room, trailing droplets of water behind her.

"Really, you were that desperate for cheap help that you scooped someone up from the provinces," Antastasia said. The others gathered in their glistening flock around her murmured with amusement. "Janos, _where_ is your family honor?"

"New Salem," tsked another. "Did you bring her here in a bucket?" 

The room burst into laughter, with the exception of the Duke, who remained stonily silent, and Charles.

"She's a first-gen," Quested said with an expansive shrug. "Call it charity."

Charles hadn't known the young woman. His practice had seen only a handful of the population of New Salem, the population desperate enough to sacrifice pride to seek his help. Still, he must have seen her, he thought, although she struck no chord of memory in him.

Next to him, Lehnsherr seemed to be having similar dark thoughts; Charles didn't dare reach out to check. The words _first-gen_ seemed to reverberate in Lehnsherr's head, the echoes made of guilt and anger both, and a fiercely stubborn love for the mother whose infidelity had given him life. Around them, the conversation buzzed on to different topics, mostly having to do with Anastasia's marriage prospects. While Lehnsherr sat in angry silence, Charles said, keeping his voice carefully quiet, "It wasn't right, you know."

"No I don't know," Lehnsherr snapped. His hawklike grey eye fixed on Charles, stormy just now with repressed emotions. "What are you talking about, that it wasn't right for Quested to hire her, or to treat her in the accepted fashion?"

"Bullying that girl proves nothing," Charles said, aware his tone had begun to heat but powerless to stop it. "If he hired her to mock her, this salon is even more of a sham than I thought. And if he did hire her out of charity, it doesn't excuse his treatment of her."

"Even a first-generation," Erik said softly. He was now, apparently, more absorbed in the contemplation of his drink than Charles's face, but the bowstring-tight line of his body, the way he inclined to Charles, said otherwise. "Even one who can't control herself."

"Even so. Even one, or both, of those things."

"How much book dust have you breathed in, that makes you say these things, Pembroke?" Lehnsherr asked. The humor hid other things – dangerous things, Charles knew.

"The archives haven't addled my wits," Charles said. "But they have told me that, in the first days," and this was dangerous, to talk about the slave times outside of the prescribed methods and rituals, "Genoshans taught and helped those who couldn't control their abilities, because every ability was needed. No one who could assist was refused if they wanted to help, and the older or more gifted strove to see that the younger or less powerful could contribute as they could."

Lehnsherr absorbed this in silence. Charles braced himself for Lehnsherr to call out his near-heresy, or to question him more closely about matters that were sincerely dangerous to Charles's continued anonymity, but Lehnsherr merely nodded and sipped his drink and continued on in a silence that became unbreakable.

For the rest of the hour, Lehnsherr said nothing to Charles, or to anyone, aside from a curt order to get ready to go not long after the clock struck ten. Quested and the others ignored the early departure as characteristic of the Duke's dislike of socializing, and no sooner had the two of them left that the conversation struck up again, more unrestrained than ever.

On the way out, they passed the hydromorph. She had hidden herself in an alcove, a green shadow among the marble and satin. Lehnsherr's purposeful step hesitated before he remembered himself enough to keep walking. Charles did not stop either, but unheeding of the risk, sent the girl a brush of reassurance and respect, what he might have given a student at the Institute after a difficult session. A pause would have given him away, and it burned, that he hurried on in Lehnsherr's wake without stopping to give the aid he, in another place, would have offered freely.

At least he and Lehnsherr had something in common now. They both nursed their own anger on the silent ride up the mountainside to where the Keep waited, an assertion of stone against the night sky. Lehnsherr glared straight ahead, piloting the car with an absent, mechanical competence.

He still had no words for Charles until they reached the staircase, a massive, branching thing that led to the family quarters off one branch, its other limbs leading to the guest rooms in the other.

"Come with me," Lehnsherr said, and that was all.

He led Charles to his room and undressed them both, directing Charles with his body and firm touches so Charles was stretched out beneath him, Erik's body cradled between his legs. The kisses Erik gave him spilled over with lust and anger and desperation, filling Charles up and threatening to drown him and wash him away from everything except what Erik wanted from him.

After, Charles let himself be held, and listened to Erik's breathing, and listened in to what he could of Erik's dreams. It felt strange, to know his body much better than the mind it housed and to sense his own body fit against Erik's while still unsure how their minds fit together – and, Charles thought with some despair, to know that the body Erik held belonged, in Erik's mind, to Francis Pembroke, not to Charles Xavier.

He exhausted himself, chasing those thoughts deep into the night. Waking up was clawing his way up through layers and layers of heavy soil, breaking finally into the upper air to find himself still tired – and, startlingly, alone. Erik had, judging by the absolute stillness of the bedroom, left some time ago.

Charles turned over, wincing as sore muscles protested. Years of involuntary celibacy had left him unused to being touched, to taking and giving until he was sated and utterly spent. It wasn't an entirely unpleasant feeling, when he didn't allow himself to think about whose body Erik thought he was touching.

Erik was nearby, his mind soft at the edges in a way it rarely was, even with Charles. It was unguarded, the iron walls around memory and love and pain pulled down and leaving him bare, so vulnerable – so open Charles almost didn't need his telepathy to know what Erik was doing. As quietly as he could, he pushed the covers away (and they had been pulled up; he had fallen asleep with his torso covered only by Erik's warm skin) and reached for his robe, careful to keep his thoughts as small as possible.

He might not have bothered. Erik sat at his desk, those worn scraps of paper and cards resting in his hands – which were gentle on them, Charles saw, so as not to tear or crease – and his memories wove tapestries in the air, so vividly and deeply felt Charles could not help but notice them. Love and loss colored them, seeping into the threads like pigment, and the threads stretched out, pulled between the past and the present, the memory of Erik's own unalloyed love for his mother and betrayal and bitter confusion. It was altogether beautiful and terrible, and Charles was so caught up in studying it that the next thing he knew was Erik saying his name, sharp as a knife cutting through his distraction.

"Still sleepy," Charles said once he'd caught up. "What are you doing?"

"Nothing." The walls had come back up, and the photographs disappeared back into the impenetrable box. Erik left it on his desk, hand resting on the top, protective. The expression he leveled at Charles was not precisely hostile, but not precisely affectionate. "I should get dressed. The Etasunin ambassador arrives today."

"Or," Charles suggested with a spirit he didn't feel, "you could come back to bed."

"That, too," Erik agreed, although his tone said he'd caught Charles's mood, and shared it.

A few minutes later, as Erik straightened his collar and examined his reflection, severe in its formal suit and decorations, he said, "Have you ever wondered if things were meant to be other than the way they are?"

 _All the time_ , Charles thought.

* * *

The Lehnsherr archives occupied a well-maintained corner in the family wing of the Keep – a corner that, like the Keep itself, was extensive and labyrinthine. Whatever long-ago earthworker had helped build this part of the fortress, she or he must have had a feel for the specifics of temperature and humidity, because the great rooms that housed the libraries and records seemed to exist independently of any of the weather's tempers. Stepping out of the archive's anteroom and to the nearest window was always something of a surprise, finding sun or rain or flat clouds in the place of whatever had occupied the view when Charles had gone in.

It was also – or had been, until recently – silent and near-abandoned, save for Charles and the one archivist squirreled away in her office. Now two new faces appeared on occasion: the Ambassador Moira MacTaggert, having recently left Quested's house and accepted the Keep's invitation to stay a fortnight, and the Duke of Genosha himself. The former appeared on occasion to pick up some carefully selected and pre-approved volumes – and, not coincidentally, Charles was sure, to speak with him – and Lehnsherr's presence was, to Charles's shackled telepathy, wholly inexplicable.

Today he had Moira at his side. The Ambassador was frowning down at the book resting in its foam cradle, as if willing it to give up its secrets. Written as it had been in a slave patois, and mixed with Adele Lehnsherr's own peculiar dialect, she could not be having much luck. For that matter, Charles had been having little of that himself, although he did his best to explain some of what Adele wrote of, from her growing family (a spouse and five children) to her memories of how the other slaves in her kin group had celebrated an ancient holiday brought with them to Genosha on the ships.

"Are you sure you're allowed to show me these things?" she asked, a smile hiding just at the corner of her mouth. "They seem very… well, _unapproved_."

Charles adjusted the book weight, running his fingers over the silken covering. Adele's handwriting seemed to race across the page, as impatient and decisive as the woman herself had been. "I'm probably not," he admitted. "But, I am."

Moira lapsed into silence, so intent on working through what he had told her that Charles could, without effort, trace the progress of her thoughts. Moira seemed very much like Adele Lehnsherr had been, women who didn't suffer fools and who did not do anything by half-measures – a good choice for one of the few humans allowed beyond the ambassadorial districts of the capitol.

"You're different from the others," she said after a moment.

Charles waited for the follow-up to that, but Moira only regarded him silently – the same probing gaze to which she had subjected Adele's diary. After a moment, Moira said, "You mentioned you had spent time away from Genosha. Where?"

"Etasuni, mostly." He had spent two years there as a child; Francis Pembroke had traveled there on one of the tours the moneyed citizens of Genosha took to acquaint them with the inferiority of the world outside the island and its six provinces. "You're from there, are you not?"

"Colam," Moira said. "The capitol. I wasn't born there, but moved when I was little. Etasuni is a large country. We're all," she hesitated, picking her way to the right word, "quite different."

"And we're not," Charles added with a smile. "Genosha is a cultural monolith. Ms. MacTaggert, that isn't very diplomatic of you."

Moira shrugged. "You don't yield your differences to strangers easily. Is that more accurate?"

The old human structures, from the buildings to the streets to the sewers, had been gutted in the capitol, everything pulled down or uprooted and replaced and given new names. The towns around New Salem, in the forgotten heart of its province, still had their old slave-names; the people who lived in them still told stories about those days, tales passed from generation to generation, sunk so down deep in the earth even the terraformers who had been sent to revive the land hadn't been able to root them out.

"It would be," Charles said at last. "You must understand, Madam Ambassador, we aren't in the habit of talking about ourselves with others."

So far as he knew, the very few humans who lived in Genosha lived either the capitol, where they worked as servants for the ambassadors from the human world, or in the marginal areas, as laborers. He had met a few in New Salem, parents of first-generation crosses between themselves and a mutant parent, and then Moira and another envoy from Europa, from one of the principalities, Germania –

"Are you quite well, Mr. Pembroke?" Moira asked. "You seem even more distracted than usual."

Her hand rested gently on his, much lighter than Erik's but no less demanding. Charles summoned his wandering attention back and gave her a smile, something reassuring he didn't quite hear himself say. Moira did not look entirely convinced by his reply, and seemed on the point of saying more, were it not for the rattle of metal and – audible to Charles's senses – impatience that marked the Duke of Genosha's approach. His rapidly approaching footsteps had him visible in short order, stalking up the long rows of bookcases toward them.

"Madam Ambassador," Erik said, pleasant on the surface but with a cutting annoyance behind it. "Did you find what you were looking for?"

Unafraid as she was, Moira still stood and bowed in respect. Charles, stunned by sudden revelation, did not. "I did, your grace," she said, indicating the three books in her arm. "Your Mr. Pembroke was giving me a bit of a history lesson."

"Was he." A thread of amusement tugged Lehnsherr's voice up from flatness. When Moira said nothing further, he added, "If you would be so kind, Madam Ambassador, Mr. Pembroke and I have matters to discuss."

"Of course. Francis," Moira inclined her head, "thank you very much for the conversation."

She left, her step quick and light, but not hurried. If she had been anxious at all while the object of Lehnsherr's disapproval – or an object of patronizing humor at Quested's, for that matter – Charles had failed to detect it. Genoshan attitudes towards humans had always rested on the assumption that humans were intrinsically _afraid_ , when they were not resentful of mutant superiority, but none of that had colored Moira's thoughts at all. Wariness, yes; still, Charles recalled her mind from those conversations at Quested's salon, and he thought its tones could have matched Lehnsherr's for annoyance and weariness with such superficiality.

Speaking of Lehnsherr, the man himself was hovering (if the Duke of Genosha could be said to hover) at Charles's side. Charles blinked up at him, and saw that Lehnsherr was looking down with that softness that seemed peculiar only to moments in which he and Charles were alone. It was not an expression Charles associated with the spaces outside of Erik's bed, or the evenings that found them both in the study with the servants banished.

"Were you giving away state secrets?" Erik asked, sounding only half-teasing.

"Considering there was no state in the time Adele Lehnsherr was writing, no." That Moira had _hoped_ he'd talk more about contemporary Genosha and its concerns had been obvious to Charles – and, probably, obvious to the Duke as well. That sort of suspicion he could not afford, despite his steadily growing conviction that the secret of Erik's parentage ought to remain his own.

"She's a compelling woman, human or no."

 _That_ was a direction Charles had not expected. He masked his shock, hiding it under a re-perusal of his notes. His empathy told him nothing useful, Erik's thoughts a stew of jealousy, irritation at his jealousy, ignorance regarding that jealousy, and so much else Charles couldn't sift it apart. "She's intelligent," Charles said at last. "And her mission here isn't insignificant."

"Dual citizenship for first-generation mutants," Erik said. Charles heard the attempt at dismissiveness, and heard how it came up short. "Less stringent requirements for visas for human family members visiting mutant relatives in Genosha."

"We send people to the outer world every year," Charles pointed out. Those visas were also tightly regulated, the product of peace treaties between Genosha and the Great Nations. "And isolation hasn't made Genosha's situation appreciably better now than it had been even a generation after the Founding." Privately, Charles thought that, for a people who celebrated evolution, their society was a fossil. He kept that to himself. "Stronger ties to the other nations could mean more opportunity for some citizens, more trade, more influence in the world government…"

He was dangerously close to running on into the kinds of ideas that had gotten his father in trouble and led to the end of their house. Charles made himself stop talking and tried to watch Lehnsherr without seeming to watch him, trembling against the sensation of an axe about to fall. Lehnsherr had taken a seat at the desk next to his, that private smile tugging at the corner of his mouth until, finally, Lehnsherr gave in and began to laugh.

"I didn't know," he said, "that I'd invited a revolutionary into my archives."

"The day common sense is revolutionary is a day our society is done for."

Lehnsherr snorted. "You sound like my mother."

 _That_ was dangerous. Charles schooled his features to neutrality. "I didn't know the nobility was that open-minded."

"I'm speaking of common sense," Lehnsherr said, "not throwing Genosha's gates open to humanity. And," he added in a somewhat more collected tone, "I didn't come here to speak of that. I came to tell you we're engaged for tomorrow fortnight. My mother's yearfast begins the night before and ends that evening with the celebrations. Your attendance is expected."

"Of course, your grace." He wondered at the invitation; the citywide observance had already been well publicized in the papers. The rest of the ducal territory would only observe the last hour before sunset and then celebrate the duchess's memory, while Erik alone, the last representative of his house, would fast the twenty-four hours.

The first yearfast for his father and mother had left him weak and aching, and that hunger had hollowed him out, a vessel filled with memories and grief. Raven had sat vigil with him and fasted herself, despite the lack of blood connection between herself and her adopted family, and her own uncertainty regarding Charles's father's ideas.

"I'll fast with you, if you need company," Charles said.

Lehnsherr blinked. _Erik_ , Charles supposed; the vulnerability around the eyes, the softness, belonged to a man who only seemed to exist in rare moments. "It isn't required for you. The rest of my family," by which Erik meant the servants and household staff, "will only observe the sunset hour."

"Still," Charles said, remembering Raven sitting with him, exchanging stories of their parents, "I'll keep you company."

"I'd like that," Erik said softly. "Thank you, Francis."

 _That isn't my name_ Charles said behind the privacy of his shields.

* * *

The surprise of being asked to join in the Duchess's yearfast observance would have driven all thoughts of finding out more about her and her mysterious _J.E_ out Charles's head if it hadn't been for his steel-trap memory and his own curiosity. In its own way, though, it reminded Charles of his conversation with Moira, and the realization that the ambassadorial districts of the ducal capitol were one of the few places where humans had any regular habitation in Genosha – and, just as importantly, one of the few places where the Duchess would have occasion to travel, or visit with any frequency.

Charles had to wait for his opportunity. The archivist, a young woman named Kitty Pryde, kept vigilant watch over the collections and knew not only what Charles had out of storage but also for what purpose. He had no way to consult more recent records, much less the accounts of the ambassadors, not with a project that had him deciphering old Genoshan dialects and handwriting. That had to wait until her day off, the Saturday both she and Erik spent in services and contemplation. Erik usually did not observe, but with his mother's yearfast drawing closer, he had spent more time in the Keep's temple, or bent over a book in his study instead of playing chess or arguing with Charles.

The contemporary records were shelved closer to the front of the archives. Charles had found no security system – no thief had ever attempted the Keep before, and Genoshan society frowned deeply on tampering with any kind of record, particularly family ones – but it was best to be safe. Even if, he reflected dryly, _safe_ meant hunching over a tablet with the archive catalogue and wandering, as if by accident, into the section housing the diplomatic records of the duchy.

He found the volume right away, a register of the Germaniae envoys since the ducal territory of Genosha had come into existence. The book was a hybrid, different paper types and typesets stitched in together, some pages faded and stained, others pristine. Charles ignored the earlier entries and went for the pages dated thirty-seven years ago. Best to start earlier than the year Erik had been born, he figured; unless the Duchess had given into temptation straightaway, she must have met the man – if she met the man – some time earlier. 

And there, at the beginning of the year and the new installation of ambassadors: 

_Presented, Hermann Schwartz, Ambassador of Germania, to the Duke and Duchess._

_Presented, Jakob Eisenhardt, attaché to the Ambassador, to the Duke and Duchess._

Charles shut the book. He put it back in its place, wiping the old leather binding clean, and left the archive.

Alone in his room some minutes later, Charles wished desperately for Raven. The knowledge he had he couldn't escape now; it had sunk into him, taken up residence in his bones, unable to be shifted or dug out, and it felt as if, by keeping it to himself, Charles might explode. The pressure of it would build and build and then –

 _You've made up your mind not to tell Emma_. Charles settled himself down in his chair. The room around him seemed unpleasantly illusory, all the fine old furniture reminders of his own past, reminders that, by law, all of this should be taken from Erik and forfeit. Duty to his country dictated that Charles steal that box and take it, and the ambassadorial register, to the authorities. And then they would call Erik before the Parliament, and strip him of his land, his titles – and they would do their best to strip him of his pride – and cast him out as a tainted exile.

 _Surely they would see reason_ , he argued. Only, he had tried to convince himself of this and that argument had gone nowhere, blocked by his own history and what he had seen at Quested's salon. _It would be better to wait, surely. If the new travel proposals go through, Genoshans will see humans aren't to be feared or looked down on… Time is what this needs._

That he might not have that time pressed at him. Emma would not wait forever, and Raven and Darwin couldn't run the Institute forever, either. His _students_ couldn't wait – but he couldn't deliver Erik into the Massachusetts Academy's clutches, not for his own ideals or for Emma's politics.

The possibility of having fallen in love with Erik had occurred to him before, but in a distant way, pushed aside or easily dismissed as mere physical attraction. Erik was beautiful, and powerful, and Charles, despite years of self-denial in New Salem, had not lost his appreciation for either of those two things. And, he had to admit, in the salons he had seen Erik's essential _aloneness_ , as much an outcast by temperament as by the secret he carried with him.

_You could tell him. Tell him everything._

More than ever, he wanted Raven with him. Charles tucked himself more deeply into his chair and tried to imagine his sister's impatience with him. For a metamorph, one who could conceal her true appearance as easily as breathing, Raven was passionately devoted to honesty – to uncompromising bluntness, really – and the thought of hiding anything from Erik would have been anathema to her.

 _He deserves it. He deserves to know he isn't alone – that he has friends. A friend._ He deserved more from Charles for that tentative trust he'd extended, taking Charles into his home and under his patronage. Charles had heard the whispers about that, and the clucking about Lehnsherr taking a lover without a consort or heir in sight – and the vague astonishment that, after so many years of being unattached, Lehnsherr _had_ attached himself to someone. If they had attended more of the events in the capitol's never-ending social calendar, Charles might have heard more about it, but he'd heard enough.

He'd been more than close enough to Erik, body and mind, to know how strange this was, and to see Lehnsherr circling around him warily, moving in for touch and companionship on his terms before shifting away again. Confessing might drive Lehnsherr away from him forever, a thought that filled Charles with more dismay than he was prepared for. Still, Charles imagined carrying this weight forever, or the weight of being the person responsible for Lehnsherr's downfall, or the weight of his students and their families having nowhere to turn.

 _He deserves better than this._ Charles snorted. _Everyone does._

* * *

The next morning at breakfast, the servants pretended not to see through the charade that was Charles coming downstairs from the guest wing and into the breakfast room fifteen minutes after the duke. A quiet girl, a low-level light manipulator, poured his coffee and indicated the buffet, waiting on the table underneath one of the old Duke's more impressive canvases. Erik had already set himself up with his spare breakfast of coffee and a peculiar kind of pancake he liked, thick sour cream on the side, and eggs.

Charles helped himself to breakfast and sat down, and kept his good-mornings to himself. Erik had the news on his tablet, and a frown on his face that said, regardless of the passion of last night, he was not to be disturbed.

While Charles plowed through his own eggs, one of the footmen entered, a soft wave of purpose preceding him into the room, thoughts of Charles carried along with it. Charles looked up, scarcely acknowledging the "Mr. Pembroke, message for you," and accepted the neatly folded white envelope.

"A missive from the outside world?" Erik asked with his usual sarcastic teasing. "I thought they'd forgotten about you. People think you must be some kind of psionic manifestation, since they never see you outside of my presence."

"Even I have friends," Charles said with a blitheness he didn't feel. He recognized the texture of the paper, the weight of it, and strove to remain calm while he opened it. "A distant cousin," he said with a sigh that shook more than it ought, and refolding the letter and placing it beneath his plate, added, "she'll be in town, and I'm afraid I can't escape seeing her."

 _Dear heart_ , the letter said, _I've heard of your good fortune in securing such a powerful patron. I hope to see you at the Duchess's celebrations soon; it's been too long since we've seen each other. Dress warmly, though, as I understand the weather to be unseasonably cold._

* * *

The two weeks passed with a swiftness that left no space for Charles to confess. He meant to, but ruled by perversity as he seemed to be, Erik had kept themselves – or himself – constantly engaged, with the business of the realm or the endless round of appearances at social events Erik seemed to despise as much as Charles did. Being shown off as a tame historian, and being called upon to recite one history or other (or supply the deficiency of someone's knowledge), had far less attraction than even the modicum Charles had seen as a child at his mother's parties.

"It isn't about the history, darling," his mother had said once before another such engagement, inspecting the glitter of her jewelry in her dressing-room mirror. "It's about appearing to know the history. Or being in a position to have someone at hand to tell you about it."

The evening of the Duchess's yearfast arrived, the entire Keep silent and shrouded in black and silver. The staff and Kitty had all gone to their quarters, and even to Charles's limited telepathy, Magneto Keep echoed with the complete silence that was an absence of thought and life. In the Keep's temple, Erik had finished lighting the candles that would burn through the night and the following day, until the hour after sunset, and he was now walking out, tall and spare and already seeming not quite of this world – already, Charles thought, being pulled back into the past.

 _Fasting_ , in its strictest form, included abstinence from all food and drink save water, and from sex, and anything that might be remotely enjoyable. The night of his parents' yearfast, Charles had meditated himself down into memory, anchored to the present only by Raven's hands wrapped around his. Now, Charles prepared himself for a night of silence and being more or less alone with his own thoughts, so when Erik reached out for him, long fingers curling around his and holding them tight, he nearly started and pulled away.

"I don't know how you observe the custom in your part of the country," Erik said, "but on the fast-night, we talk about the dead. Our memories, our regrets, the things we don't regret." Charles choked back a laugh; that seemed a very Erik sort of way to describe _happiness_. Erik must have sensed that himself, for his mouth curled in one of his usual dry smiles.

They ended on the couch in Erik's favorite study, Erik's arm around him, his fingers stroking thoughtfully across Charles's shoulder. Charles skimmed his empathy across the surface of Erik's mind and found the usual tangle of hard edges and softness, where his love for his mother was threaded through with barbed steel and anger and a bitter longing. Regret was there, too, and before Charles could help it, he reached to touch a memory, pushing aside the opacity of half-forgetfulness to reveal it, in all its brightness.

"After I turned eight, my mother decided I was old enough to help with the candles for the Lights Festival," Erik murmured. Charles flinched back, but Erik didn't appear to sense his meddling. He gazed into the fire instead, the volatile light of it recalling the smaller dancing lights of the candles. "I felt very… grown-up, having seen her or Mrs. Pryde," that must be Kitty's mother, the former archivist, "light the candles, and wanting to do it myself."

"That sounds beautiful," Charles said, although the memories, tinted by time and Erik's love, and the golden warmth of the candlelight, escaped that word.

"I almost dropped the leader when she gave it to me." Erik's memories gave him the context: the slim white candle that sat at the end of the branching candelabrum, lit so it could give light to its companions. Charles smiled softly and felt the warmth that meant Erik was smiling too. "We always observed the national holidays, of course, but the holidays of our people were much more important to her. Pesach, Yom Kippur, Purim, our own new year… She felt more connected with them, I think."

"Our country can't give us everything," Charles said, possibly daring far more than he should, but risking it in return for the memories Erik had offered him. "Even a Duchess needs more than that."

Erik remained silent, although if he took offense at Charles's remark, he didn't say anything.

"Your mother married for politics," Charles said, as gently as he could. "She married for the reason many of us do." Those were the same reasons why the families of New Salem were so closely regulated, and _unsuitable unions_ punished – unions with a weak or lower-level mutant, with a human. "She needed more than her duty to her country – as many of us do."

"You haven't married," Erik said, meditatively.

"The pressure on me can't be the same as that placed on you, or your mother. Empaths generally don't get the same lecture on duty and honor that metallokinetics belonging to the ducal house do, I wager." 

In the past he might have gotten that lecture, but treason flowed down through generations Genoshans thought, breeding dissent along with genetic gifts. And telepaths had always been thought of differently, anyway, useful only so long as they remained in the station to which their line had called them. The psionics in Charles's line, in the estimation of the PCAA, had already developed _tendencies_ ; his father's marriage to the daughter of a conservative house had been meant to correct those flaws as much as to improve the bloodline. Charles wondered what the committee had thought when Sharon Grey had fallen as much in love with Brian Xavier as he had with her.

"She never remarried after my father died," Erik continued, the thought branching off from Charles's words, prompted to grow out of that and Erik's own memories. "I know it wasn't because she loved him." Charles made himself stay very still, overcome with the wild hope that perhaps Erik would save him from his dilemma and tell him about his mother and Jakob Eisenhardt himself, but Erik only said, "I think… I think she wished to remain single. My father hadn't been Judaic; the ceremonies, services and everything were always my mother's and he never joined her. Any other marriage might have ended up the same way."

 _Loveless_. Erik's hand tightened on Charles's shoulder. "She faced much criticism for that, I seem to remember. Not that I was born then, of course, but… gossip."

Erik snorted. "She didn't care about that."

"She was too good for it." Too proud; the Lehnsherr bloodline was as famous for that as anything. "And," Charles added, "she had you."

"Yes," Erik agreed. "We had each other."

Charles had nothing to say to that, too busy turning over the realization that Erik, no matter how much he had tried, could not hate his mother for her betrayal. He would have heard stories of the old Duke; he had not been a kind man, wedded to Genosha through and through, and probably with little care or pity, much less fondness, for the young woman wedded to him. And Edie Lehnsherr, as headstrong and determined as her ancestors – as Adele Lehnsherr, whose diary Charles had left in its cradle at the sundown gong earlier – would have thrown over custom and duty, and maybe seeing a handsome young man at the ambassadorial presentation, decided to fall in love with him.

He could not, Charles realized, do to Edie Lehnsherr now what might have been done to her had she lived and the world found out about her crime, and no more could he do it to her than do it to her son.

"You seem distracted," Erik murmured into the silence that had been building between them. "I can almost feel it."

With infinite care, Charles pulled his telepathy back in. He had no idea what the sensitivity of any anti-psionic devices here might be, but alarms hadn't once gone off in his weeks here. All the same, the desire to work himself into Erik's cortex and give him comfort and everything else – love, devotion, the protection he'd freely given to his students – almost hurt, it was that keen, that cutting, and better to close off now before he gave in and did something both of them might regret.

"Just thinking," Charles said, ignoring Erik's laugh and _what else is new_. "When my parents died, I had my sister with me for their yearfast. She kept it with me, although she was adopted and didn't have to. She was all I had."

Erik made a soft noise of assent. "Are you saying you're all I have?"

"At the moment? Yes."

"Not just at this moment," Erik said softly before turning Charles's face up to his and kissing him.

It wasn't passionate, only a quiet stroking of Erik's fingers across his cheekbone and a chaste pressure of mouth on mouth, nothing like Erik's forcefulness in bed. Ferocity was there, though, hidden in the corners, reined in by Erik's memory of decorum and respect – for his mother of course, Charles thought with a smile that made Erik grunt and kiss him a little more deeply; what society might say of their relationship, if they ever heard Charles had done what only blood relatives or spouses did and kept vigil with him, Erik wouldn't care.

"Are you hungry?" Erik asked, stroking the hair back from Charles's temple. "Psionics can't fast easily, and you shouldn't suffer."

"I'm fine," Charles told him, and, greatly daring, projected a bit of his contentment to Erik.

Erik didn't seem entirely satisfied, but let it go with only a grumble about stubborn Pembrokes, and when Charles asked after more memories of his mother, Erik gave them gladly. Underneath the memories of growing up in the ducal palace, though, ran Erik's confusion over his mother's betrayal, the conviction that had started, even when young and unknowing, he heard his mother speak of _your father_ and _my husband_ as two different men, one warm and loving, grieved that he never had a chance to know his son, the other stern as the Keep's mountain home.

"Whatever she did, you should forgive her," Charles said.

The body under his went tense. "What makes you say that?"

"I'm an empath," Charles told him, wincing internally at the partial truth. "I can feel your… indecision about her." Erik tensed further and Charles, feeling the peace about to give way beneath him, said, "She wasn't a woman given to regretting what she did when she felt it was right. Whatever she did, it was to protect you."

Erik had nothing to say to that. He didn't move away, which gave Charles courage enough to lean in closer, the contact more definite. "The way you talk about her," he said after another few minutes of silently watching the fire, "it says you've already mostly forgiven her. It's only that you _feel_ you should be angry, and so you are."

"Maybe because I _should_ be," Erik said. His mind trembled on the brink of tipping over and confessing to Francis Pembroke what Charles Xavier already knew before his characteristic self-control pulled it back.

"Why?" Charles asked. "What did she do that was so terrible?"

"I can't tell you that, Francis," Erik said, a coolness settling in his thoughts. "Let it go."

"As my lord wishes."

* * *

The fast, as was often the case, had stripped away Charles's situation to essentials, as if the hunger had gnawed all the meat and complexity off the bones and left Charles with the inescapable truth: Erik deserved to be told, and Charles deserved to face the consequences. And better, he told himself, face the consequences from Erik before going to Emma tonight.

They had fallen asleep together at some point in the night when the fire had died, and the sun came up on the black-draped library, and Erik standing at the mantel over the fireplace, gazing at the great portrait of his mother, so sharp with grief Charles felt cut by it. Cowardice started up and told him _not now, wait until after, until later_ , but no – now, Charles knew, was the time for confidences.

"Erik," Charles said, pushing himself upright. "How was your night?"

"Better, now you're here," Erik said absently. "Thank you."

"It was my…" _Pleasure_ was not the right word, or was duty. "I wanted to do it."

"Let me thank you without getting a sermon back," Erik said, irascible as ever, but not truly angry with him, or wanting to remain so.

"That was hardly a sermon."

"Contradiction, then." Erik looked away, gaze going distant and absent before he said, a bit stiffly, "Thank you as well for what you said to me last night. It was… a comfort to me, to hear those words."

There was nothing for it; it was either accept Erik's thanks gracefully and escape, or risk his anger and the end of the new intimacy they'd found last night. Charles drew a breath.

"I had my reasons for telling you as much," Charles said.

"Oh?" Erik moved away from the fireplace, looming a little.

"Yes," Charles said, forcing himself to meet those steel-grey eyes. "And if you sit down, I'll tell you everything."

He let a bit of command slip into the words, more than suggestion but less than imperative, and Erik sat on the edge of an armchair, leaning forward. He still wore yesterday's clothes, Charles saw, rumpled collar and soft pants, both dark for mourning. Shadows edged his eyes, suggesting a night more sleepless than not, although Charles had only the vaguest memories of wakefulness.

 _I'm not only an empath_ , he said, nearly shuddering at the relief of, finally, using his abilities, _finally_ being able to touch that remarkable mind without the clumsy, muffling layers of his shields. Erik jumped violently, a shudder of surprise working through him, and in its wake like jet contrails were confusion, betrayal, anger, _what, what is this, who is he –_

 _I'm talking to you like this because to talk to you otherwise isn't safe, for either yourself or me_ , Charles told him. The impulse to call the household guards – to lash out with metal, to chain and bind – coursed through Erik, and Charles held his breath lest the impulse catch Erik up and force him to act. Before he could, Charles added, a flurry of pleading and sincerity, _And I'm talking to you because you deserve the truth for my being here, and how you can protect both of us. And so many others. ___

__For a moment, Charles saw his extremely short and unpleasant future flash in front of his eyes. He held himself still, his telepathy in check, holding himself as open as he could so Erik could, if he wanted, look and _see_ , and – Charles hoped fervently – understand._ _

__This might well be another betrayal. First his mother and the secret she'd kept from him, and now Charles, who had rapidly become something like a friend, the only one Erik had allowed himself._ _

__"Explain yourself, then," Erik said hoarsely. "What do you mean by coming here? If your answer isn't satisfactory…"_ _

___I didn't come here to blackmail you_ , Charles said, although in point of fact, he had come to the capitol for that precise reason. But here, in the quiet of the Keep, only the two of them, no. _I came here to warn you that someone desires to do so. And that I want to do everything in my power to stop it.__ _

___Maybe you should start off with who you really are._ Erik's gaze was hawklike, nearly as penetrating as a telepath's, an expression peculiar to him; in bed, he would look at Charles like that, cataloguing every detail, stripping Charles of every shield and barrier between himself and being seen. _You aren't Francis Pembroke, I take it.__ _

__Charles smiled crookedly and inclined his head, perhaps more insouciantly than he ought. _Charles Xavier at your service. Late of Westchester.__ _

___That name._ Memory flickered through Erik's head. He had been young, very young, when the news of the Xaviers' disgrace had come, and not much older when the House had been nearly dissolved, its humiliation complete. _Did you come for vengeance, then?__ _

__"No," Charles said, blinking to hear himself speak out loud. "To correct an injustice, and prevent another from happening. To prevent many others, some that are happening even as we speak."_ _

__Erik's skepticism battered at him. "You're a telepath. You came here under false pretenses," _you came into my bed, my life_ , and Erik was revisiting all those memories, warm and cherished as they were, preparing to lock them away down deep, banished to a seamless box of their own. "How am I supposed to trust you, precisely? For that matter, why should I?"_ _

__"Because I know you," Charles said, the only answer he could give._ _

__Erik snorted. "You know nothing about me."_ _

___I know everything_ , Charles said, although aloud, he made it, "I know enough."_ _

__"Everything," Erik said, face pale. His jaw set, mind darkening with anger like storm clouds gathering, anger piling upon fury upon anger, the pressure building inexorably and threatening to obliterate whatever stood in its path. "That means you – "_ _

___That means you know_ , Erik meant, and as swiftly as the realization came, the heat of anger vanished – or, not vanished, but froze, coating Erik's thoughts in ice._ _

___Yes. And yet I was with you last night_ , Charles interrupted, giving Erik the memory of lying on this very couch together, the comfort he had tried to give. _Would I tell you to forgive, if I thought your mother had done something shameful – something that should end your title to the dukedom, to all respect and honor in Genosha? Would I tell you to forgive her if I planned on shouting her secret, and yours, to every corner of the country – or if I wanted to deliver you into a situation even worse?__ _

__Erik believed he could have, and easily. Every metal object in the room trembled, the poker and shovel by the fireplace, the heavy iron grate, the chandeliers in their high recesses above them._ _

___You know me_ , Charles sent, folding memories into the words, everything he had said and done, the moments in which Erik had seen him clearly, Francis Pembroke's name or not. _You know why my family was disgraced. Do you think I would disgrace you for the same reason – do you think I would be that much of a hypocrite?__ _

__He allowed himself his own anger, letting Erik see the soft, fierce glow of it. _I could go to the Massachusetts Academy, or to the Parliamentary Commission. I could destroy both of us. You could destroy me right now, before either of those two things happened, and I will be a ghost who never existed. Or we can work together. We can help each other, and help other people.__ _

__A plan formed in his head even as he spoke, a future free of the Commission and the pointless, ancient hatreds and prejudices that propped up Genoshan society. It was a future for Westchester, for New Salem and all the children and adults Charles had met in his years of work. It was, selfishly, a future for his House, for Raven, himself._ _

__"You need me more than I need you," Erik said roughly. "You've already admitted as much – and admitted that you won't go running to the tabloids." He laughed, a tight and bitter sound. "That's very generous of you, by the way."_ _

__"I'm not your friends," Charles told him, and gave him the image of themselves at one of Quested's endless parties, surrounded by people neither of them could abide – people who would cast them out if they so much as suspected the truth of Erik's parentage or Charles's identity._ _

__"You aren't that," Erik agreed. "Why do you need my help?"_ _

__"To change things," Charles said. "To change everything, if we're lucky."_ _

__The laugh Erik gave him this time was still dry, but without the bitterness of before. "Restraint – or realism – isn't your strong suit."_ _

__"One mustn't be afraid to dream," Charles said._ _

__"Or be afraid to look at reality."_ _

___I've seen reality every day_. He let Erik see the run-down district of New Salem where the Institute still struggled on, the children and parents, all of them with only the help he could give them and the help their community could spare from the simple act of surviving. Erik's mouth thinned, and of course he thought of Quested's servant, the charity-case, the lower-powered mutants and the _Zeeds_ who haunted the unmentionable corners of Genoshan society._ _

__"We're weakening ourselves," Charles said softly. "All our genealogies, our hierarchies, our _laws_ have done nothing but hold us back. We tell ourselves they're what make us different, make us _better_ , but that's a much bigger lie than anything I could ever tell you."_ _

__"And you want me to help you change the world," Erik said. He'd stood up again and begun to pace, moving with the tight control of a predator. He had been, Charles remembered, in the army; however ceremonial a duty that might be these days, with Genosha at peace, he had taken it seriously. "You want me to throw aside my duty to my House, to my _country_ , to my ancestry – "_ _

___Your ancestry on your father's side is somewhat different_ , Charles said, hearing Erik's own mind as it voiced the same thing. _And your mother did what she did only because she did not want you to suffer the ostracism she knew would fall on you – on both of you. She didn't care for herself, but for you.__ _

__"So you want me to fall on my sword," Erik said, not looking at him._ _

__"Nothing so dramatic," Charles said, "and nothing involving so much blood. This is not about destroying you, Erik. Or destroying your House, Genosha, or anything. Don't think like – " _Like one of them_ , he wanted to say, but didn't, although he suspected that Erik heard that anyway. "This isn't an attempt to take us back to the old days. We're still there, we've _always_ been there, in many ways. This is about change, and that isn't destruction."_ _

__Erik couldn't quite make himself believe that, his thoughts spiky with confusion and anger at that confusion._ _

__"You should think on it," Charles said at last, bled out and exhausted, an ache left where fear had been that tightened his temples and made pain spark there. "But I swear to you, my Lord, I _am_ loyal to you, whatever may happen to me."_ _

__He bowed, although the Duke did not seem to see it, nor see Charles as he departed._ _

____

* * *

The quiet of the Keep dissipated as the day drew on, a fog broken apart by the servants bustling to set up the ballrooms and salons that would host the guests – no bedrooms, however; the Duke refused all visitors this year, as he had done every year since he had come out of his regency and taken control of his House. Then the food began to appear, and the musicians with their cases of instruments, and the sound of their tuning-up echoed through the halls of the Keep.

Charles tried to ignore it, but finding himself useless for working in the archives, spent the rest of the day drifting at the periphery of the preparations. Kitty, supervising the hanging of some older pictures from the Lehnsherr vaults and the display of the family's first recorded genealogy (hand drawn on a piece of Genoshan palm paper in time-faded letters), pressed him into service. It meant much back-and-forth between the main galleries and the vaults in the archives, and meant that Charles saw nothing of Erik for the rest of the day. With his telepathy fettered again, he felt nothing, and Erik's absence was so complete that, if it hadn't been for one of the valets sweeping upstairs with the ducal regalia and a command to one of the servants to draw his lordship's bath, Charles would have thought him gone entirely.

Eventually the last of the silence died as the guests arrived, teleporting in or flying or driving up the precipitous slope to the Keep. From his room, with his own clothes half on and half-forgotten, Charles watched the long train of lights processing through the evening, and thought that, aside from occasionally returning for some forgotten or necessary item, he had not been in here for weeks, not since Erik had taken him to his bed. 

_You've done what you can_ , he told himself, _and you're committed now. Committed to him._

He thought, with some despair, that he really might have fallen in love with Erik. Last year he never would have considered sacrificing his life and his people for one person – Emma had banked on that; she still would be, coming here tonight, expecting to find him with information for her, or at least the promise of it – but now… He swallowed heavily.

At last the gong sounded, summoning the household to battle stations. Charles hastily knotted his tie and checked the drape of his coat – flawless; he remembered his mother's lessons well – and headed downstairs. Kitty joined him, her sober grey archivist's uniform gone and replaced with silk and pearls.

"What did you say to his lordship today?" she asked, her quick smile growing from friendly to teasing. "He's been more silent than usual, which is saying something."

"And what makes you think I said anything to him?" That he was sleeping with the duke was common knowledge, although Kitty and the others, with the strange tact Genoshans exhibited when it came to these matters, had never mentioned it, or had spoken around it.

"You make him think," Kitty said. "He rarely visited the archives before you came."

She left him before he could say anything to that, hiking her skirt up so she could dart off through the walls to the archival displays.

"Maybe she thinks you're a good influence."

The Ambassador had joined him, wearing a smile of her own and a dress carefully cut to the latest Genoshan fashion, properly black and trimmed with the colors of the ducal house. She took Charles by the arm, and perforce he allowed her to slide her arm through his so they could bend close together. It was not an innocent position, not in the least, to be seen walking arm-in-arm with an envoy from the human world, and Charles started back, knowing the constructions that could be put on it.

Moira, mercifully, let him go. "In Etasuni, that would be unforgivably rude," she told him, although not reprovingly. "I imagine whatever capital you're trying to bank by being an intimate in the Duke's house would be squandered, being seen with me." When Charles only stared at her, she shrugged. "You research things most Genoshans don't seem to care much about; I saw you at Quested's salons, having to keep yourself from objecting when they insulted me or mutants they saw as being beneath them. I figured there's a reason you've been trying to ingratiate yourself with his Grace, and it's nothing to do with the status quo… unless it's to change it."

"And if you suspect that," Charles murmured, "then you shouldn't damage my chances. They might well be _your_ chances, Ambassador." He hesitated. "Do you trust me?"

"More than most," Moira said.

 _Then don't give the other people here the chance to suspect me_. Her eyes went wide in shock and she stared, falling off her stride for a step before collecting herself. _Let me speak with the Duke. If I can help you in your mission here, I will, but I can't do it…_

 _Like this_ , Moira finished. She stepped gracefully away and nodded to him, and held out her hand to shake, a gesture that Charles recognized from his travelogues on the Etasunin and their customs. "Dr. Pembroke, a pleasure as always."

The yearfast celebrations had been confined to a corner of the Keep, the set of rooms and balconies on the southwestern face to catch the last light of the sun coming over the mountains. Like many of the ancient houses – like the old keep of the Xaviers – it had been constructed in a hodgepodge of styles as each generation had added to the building, covering its organic austerity with decoration, with arches and leaded glass and winding porticos and hanging gardens protected by the abilities of the gardeners. Not many, Charles recalled, had seen this part of the building since Erik had taken over; aside from the yearfasts for his parents and the new year, he had no society here.

Now it seemed as if _all_ of Genosha were here – or, Charles thought as he reinforced his shields, the part of Genosha that mattered. Quested, Braddock, and Blaire had gathered in a corner, already deep in gossip; Quested saw him and raised his glass, a brief flicker not-really-regret at not having gotten the brilliant Francis Pembroke for his own. Archivists from the capitol library had come, including Hank McCoy, who hovered anxiously by Kitty's shoulder, and even managed to sink into her shadow, despite being at least a foot taller than Kitty herself. The burghers of the capital were there, the more important bankers and merchants and intellectuals, and representatives from the provincial governments, including – 

"Raven?" Charles stared, half-expecting his sister's blue face and red hair to vanish and be replaced with another face – a similar one, one that had some business being here in a sleek red dress and fine jewelry. "What are you – "

"My apprenticeship," Raven said. Her golden eyes swept over him as if half-expecting _him_ to vanish. "What are _you_ doing here?"

Charles tugged her out of the worst of the crowd, into a corner far enough away from prying ears and eyes, and risked sending out a _nothing to see here_ to the few people who drifted too close. "I'm here for reasons relating to…"

Raven scowled and hissed. "I might have guessed. What has she got you doing, or should I say _who_?"

Before leaving, he hadn't been able to avoid telling Raven about his departure and at least some of the reason for it. Raven had been very emphatic about what she thought of Frost and the Massachusetts Academy, and what she thought about Charles for going along with it. _Why doesn't she ask me? I'd have an easier time of it_ , she'd asked, and then realizing the answer, _Because Frost likes having you under her thumb_ had almost had her determined to find Frost herself, and damn the consequences.

"I can't tell you that, and no one," Charles informed her. His slight blush informed her of the contrary, and Raven saw it immediately. "This isn't seduction and intrigue, Raven. It's… it's something else entirely."

"Really," Raven said.

 _Not now_ , Charles said, ignoring her twitch of discomfort, _and not here. Raven, things have changed. Trust me. Please?_

There wasn't much more time to get an agreement out of her; with his senses on hyperalert, he caught the first icy hints of Emma Frost's presence spreading through the room like a chill. The rest of the party seemed unaffected beyond perfunctory greetings – the people who knew the true purpose of the Massachusetts Academy, and the true source of Emma's influence, were hardly inclined to talk about it. Raven, taller than Charles by a couple of inches, an advantage augmented by her high heels, saw Emma first. _I'll strangle her with her fucking furs_ , Raven told him silently. _See if I don't_.

"Don't," Charles whispered. "Tempting, but don't."

Raven vibrated furiously but kept still, her grip tightening around the stem of her champagne glass. Emma drifted close, close enough for Charles to see the complacent coolness in her pale eyes, the expectation that he would have something for her – and if those expectations weren't met, that her next step would bring the final dissolution of the Institute and Charles's work, and that Raven would go down with him.

 _I won't let her_ , Charles said, falling back on the old, deeply private way of communicating they had had as children. It had fallen by the wayside as they'd grown older, as Raven had, despite herself, struggled with her own prejudices against his telepathy and her own yearning to escape from the invisibility her adopted father had consigned her to. For once, Raven didn't protest, her wrath subsiding to something Charles could mask from Emma and the other telepaths in the room.

 _Raven, dearest, I need to go_ , he said, mouth moving around other words, an observation on the weather or where the girl – a stranger, of course – had traveled from. _If I'm going to save us – or beat Emma at her own game, if you prefer – I need to leave you. Can I trust you not to do anything… not wise?_

"Go," Raven breathed, "but if _anything_ happens, so help me – "

"It won't, so long as we keep calm." Charles felt like coming out of his skin with anxiety, and knowing he had to stay _inside_ his skin, and keep the rest of his thoughts from spilling out of himself, didn't help. He gave Raven the same courteous farewell he'd given Moira, minus handshake, and set off through the crowd.

In the old days, yearfasts had been solemn celebrations, usually a ritual dinner and a gathering afterwards to recite the family genealogy and history for as far back as could be remembered. Now Kitty's old displays took the place of the recitation and dinner was a buffet of finger foods and appetizers, and the conversation on politics and the everyday. Charles drifted through a haze of the mundane, trying to look without actually looking and evading the few people who wanted to speak with him. A few people muttered about the Duke being absent, or at least his usual antisocial self, and of _course_.

Charles let a tendril of his telepathy flicker outward, testing the energy of the place, and there, on the very outskirts of the hectic glow that was the few hundred guests, in the dark beyond the lights inside the ballroom, was Erik's mind, a bright fixed point in the darkness.

"Mr. Pembroke," Erik said without turning once Charles had slipped out into the cold and silent night. _Or should I say Charles?_

 _I prefer Charles._ He liked the way it came off Erik's mind, sarcastic as Erik thought the name at him. "For now, you could call me Francis, your grace, if it pleases you."

He stood at the balustrade by Erik's side – the Duke's side, really – and hoped that, to anyone looking on, they might only be scholar and patron together. When Erik shifted closer, the hope, and a perilous amount of coherent thought, dissipated. Erik gazed steadfastly out over the southern ranges, profile caught here and there by the light from inside.

"My mother loved him very much," Erik said eventually, voice pitched low and almost lost in the breeze passing down the portico. "She never told me of him explicitly, but in her will, she left instructions for me about the box in the desk. Which," he added, with a sidelong look at Charles, "I presume you know about."

Charles's silence being taken for agreement, Erik continued, "I saw his letters to her and myself, and there was more love in them than I could ever remember seeing in – in the Duke's face." He drew a breath. "I don't know if he's still alive; I've never permitted myself to inquire, even when I was out of the country."

 _Do you see why I could never betray you?_ Charles asked. He had walled them up behind his own psionic barriers, impenetrable to Braddock's psychic knife or the colder, more subtle probing of Emma. _What you've told me, what I've learned… I could never expose that to ridicule, no matter how I profited from it._

"I know," Erik said hoarsely. He laughed, a reluctant, huffing sound, and gave Charles a sideways glance. "You're infuriatingly, nauseatingly good, Pembroke."

"I'm but your grace's humble servant," Charles murmured, which got more laughter, and some attention from inside; Charles sensed Raven – clinging tenuously to her promise not to attack Emma – and Moira drifting closer. Emma was an icy, tigerish statue in the periphery of his psychic vision, waiting for her chance to pounce.

Erik sobered, looking down on Charles with an expression serious and sad and even, and what caught at Charles's heart, yearning. "What you said about Genosha earlier… you believe that."

"I know it," Charles said. "It's not an article of faith. I have proof, and logic. Quested and the others have tradition and prejudice. But I have the future. The people in New Salem have it, if you give them – all the children who can't learn control on their own or who aren't born with it – the chance. We're as chained now as we ever were, Erik, only by ourselves this time."

He held his breath, hardly daring to hope as Erik looked at him, and in the protected space between the two of them he let Erik see more than, maybe, anyone ever had, the depth of his conviction, his life, even his long-buried and half-denied yearning to be the heir to House Xavier again. And in turn he saw Erik thinking of his mother, her own fierce pride and her sorrow, and the tentatively blooming thought that she might approve of this – might approve of Charles and his ironclad belief.

"I'll advocate for you," Erik murmured, stepping closer still, hand coming up to trace across Charles's cheek and jaw, so startling Charles nearly dropped his forgotten wineglass. "My House has enough power behind it that I can push MacTaggert's proposals through the upper house," which meant her proposals would be brought before the rest of Parliament to argue, "and I'll speak with the governors in the outer provinces."

"Thank you," Charles said, too stunned to say anything else. Erik's thoughts now seethed with _not enough_ , knowing that it was likely Charles would never be restored to his House, at least not for many years. _That doesn't matter, Erik. It doesn't matter at all, next to everything else._

"A strong old Genoshan House would help," Erik argued. "If I can restore House Xavier to the register, that would go a long way, but it might exhaust all the political capital I have. And I'm sure you wouldn't take money."

"I would," Charles admitted, wincing at the memory of the Institute's finances. "But I would more happily take any aid that would remove the stigma attached to being weak or having no inborn control. That's what's needed."

"Details later." Erik was still touching Charles's face, as if re-learning it, learning it now that it belonged to Charles Xavier instead of Francis Pembroke. "Would you still – even if it is insulting to ask it of the son of an old House – would you still consent to being under my patronage? Or, if not that, being in my house as my companion?" His thin, expressive mouth quirked. "I've gotten rather used to you. I can almost tolerate your idealistic ramblings, or at least tolerate them better than Quested's. They're better informed, at least."

"I think there was a compliment in there somewhere," Charles said, "but I'm having a hard time finding it."

"Is this easier to divine, then?" Erik asked, and quite before Charles knew it, he was bent over, caught helplessly on the support of Erik's arm and dependent on that alone to keep from toppling over backwards. He yelped and felt champagne splash coldly over his hand, and opened his mouth to tell Erik to unhand him, he had _dignity_ , and found himself cut off, very decisively, by Erik kissing him.

 _I think so_ , he said, his psionic voice shaking and nearly breathless itself. Erik grinned down at him, wide and far too pleased and smug, before kissing him again.

That, the Duke of Genosha kissing an insignificant scholar who had no fortune or ability to produce an heir, would probably not be scandalous enough for Emma. But, laughing into Erik's mouth and feeling Erik's pleasure sweep and crash against him like the wind against the mountain rocks, Charles found – for the first time in a long time – that he didn't care.


End file.
